The Darko Principle

I've had this theory percolating in my head for a while, and it's starting to become fully shaped. It's something that I call the Darko Principle. The Darko Principle refers, of course, to Darko Milicic and the debacle that was the 2003 NBA draft. In that draft, LeBron James was universally acknowledged to be the best player, so the Cavaliers took him first. After LeBron, things got fuzzy. The second overall pick belonged to the Detroit Pistons, and they had a bevy of options for improving their already stellar team. There was a host of can't-miss former college standouts, including Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony, but there was one player who was a wild card: Darko Milicic. Darko played professional basketball in Europe, and scouts praised his "upside." Because he played in Europe, it was hard to gauge his talent, but scouts were in agreement that with a few years of development, Darko would develop into an excellent player.

So the Pistons took Darko. And now, a few years later, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony have developed into perennial all-stars, while Darko is still sitting on the bench (and not even the Pistons' bench anymore). So what gives? Why would anyone pick a guy who should develop into a great player when there are great players strewn everywhere? My attempts to explain this kind of madness are where the Darko Principle gets it genesis. The Principle goes as follows:

People prefer potential to skill, fantasy to reality, and mystery to clarity.

A corollary to the Darko Principle is the Dwayne Wade Corollary: When people make decisions based on the Darko Principle, they tend to make bad decisions. This logically follows, because decisions based on murky, vague, and hopeful data tend to come out pretty bad, especially when compared to decisions made on concrete, straightforward data. The applications of these two theories to sports are obvious, but I argue that we operate on the Darko Principle in our everyday life, and it always come out bad.

In economics, dating, psychology, or pretty much anything else, we see people exercising the Darko Principle every day. You see it in the way people naturally prefer stocks to bonds; they'd rather possibly make tons of money than definitely make some money. And I'd rather buy a CD from some artist I've never heard of rather than Thom Yorke, even though I know that everything that Thom Yorke has ever made has been terrific. We want new, different, unknown.

So the trick is spotting ourselves doing Darko thinking and reminding ourselves of the Wade Corollary. For inspiration refer to the following excerpt from the movie High Fidelity. Go and do likewise.

-That other girl, or other women, whatever, I was thinking that they're just fantasies, you know, and they always seem really great because there are never any problems, and if there are they're cute problems like we bought each other the same Christmas present or she wants to go see a movie I've already seen, you know? And then I come home and you and I have real problems and you don't want to see the movie I wanna see, period. There's no lingerie...

-I have lingerie!

-Yes you do. You have great lingerie but you also have cotton underwear that's been washed a thousand times and its hanging on the thing and ... and they have it too just I don't have to see it because it's not the fantasy ... do you understand? I'm tired of the fantasy because it doesn't really exist and there are never really any surprises and it never really...

-Delivers?

-Delivers. Right. And I'm tired of it and I'm tired of everything else for that matter but I don't ever get tired of you.

Darko just doesn't deliver.