That chart hung in the locker room all night.
The next day, when preseason practice ended, Lin Qi did not dismiss the players. He kept everyone in the video room, drew the curtains, and had the video coordinator play the tape of yesterday's intrasquad scrimmage.
"Yesterday, someone asked me whether the calculations on that chart were wrong."
Standing beside the screen, Lin Qi looked around at the skeptical players. "P.J. Brown of the white team scored six points all game and ranked second. Meanwhile, Magic Johnson of the green team scored four points and grabbed three rebounds, yet ranked first on his team."
Sam Cassell leaned back in his chair with his arms folded, his face plainly saying, Let's see how you explain this one. Starting center Magic Johnson sat in a corner, his broad shoulders slumped as he scratched his head awkwardly.
"I won't bother explaining those formulas to you." Lin Qi nodded to the video coordinator. "I'll let you see for yourselves."
The screen lit up.
The first possession.
It was the moment when Garnett, the white team's nineteen-year-old rookie, had suffered a complete "CPU overload" under the green team's barrage of high-post dribble handoffs between Radja and Eddie Jones.
On-screen, the crossing screens from Radja and Eddie had completely pulled Garnett out of defensive position. Radja looked set to finish an easy feed under the basket...
P.J. Brown, also on the white team, slipped over silently from the weak side. With a perfectly timed hedge, he used his chest to stop Radja dead for half a second.
That half second was enough for Garnett to scramble back into position.
"See that?" Lin Qi paused the tape. "None of that shows up on the scoreboard. But Brown prevented those two points, and there were plenty more plays like it. That's why he ranked second."
Sam Cassell raised his eyebrows and was just about to speak when Lin Qi cut him off, pointing at another figure on the screen. "But look at the green team. The instant Brown rotated over, what was their starting center, Magic Johnson, doing?"
Lin Qi signaled for the video coordinator to enlarge the image and freeze it under the basket.
"At that point, the white team's Finley had already spotted the open man and was about to collapse into the paint to cover for Brown. But Magic Johnson, this two-meter-eleven big man, never even touched the ball. He just shifted two steps sideways in an instant and, with a back as broad as a wall, bang, pinned Finley firmly outside the lane."
Lin Qi jabbed his finger hard at the center of the screen. "In the end, Brown and the recovering Garnett did disrupt Radja, and the shot missed. But Magic Johnson's off-ball seal shut down the white team's only help rotation. If the ball hadn't slipped out of Radja's hand, that would have been an easy inside basket. On offense, Ervin silently used his body and basketball IQ to create the best possible conditions for his teammate."
Then Lin Qi had the video coordinator switch clips.
It was the next possession. David Wesley of the white team stole the ball, and the white team's young guns launched a furious counterattack, Garnett and Finley sprinting up parallel lanes on either side like two young leopards.
It looked certain to end in an unstoppable fast-break slam.
But the green team's center, Magic Johnson, that big, burly Black man whom the media had mocked for years as "slow-footed, with no offensive game," had already turned around the instant Wesley stole the ball.
He did not blindly retreat beneath the basket. Instead, when he reached the free-throw line, he suddenly took a precise lateral slide, putting his enormous body squarely in Wesley's passing lane.
That move alone forced Wesley to lob his pass high, instantly slowing the break's sheer speed.
By the time Garnett caught the delayed pass in midair, the green team's entire defense was set. Radja contested Garnett's forced shot, and it clanged off the rim.
Once again, nothing on-screen generated a single statistic. No points, no rebounds, no blocks; Ervin was not even credited with a steal or a contested shot.
Yet a surging counterattack the white team had been sure would succeed died silently in Magic Johnson's defensive shadow.
"Again, none of that shows up on the scoreboard." Lin Qi resumed playback, his voice steady and firm in the silent video room. "He didn't block a shot or steal the ball. But with his two-meter-eleven frame and defensive anticipation a full tier above every one of you, he cut off the white team's launch point before it developed."
The clips played one after another.
More than a dozen possessions, every one a master class in overpowering defense and off-ball play.
In 1995, when everyone looked only at highlights and scoring, Lin Qi's analytics team used an advanced statistical model thirty years ahead of its time to strip away every visual disguise and lay the truth bare...
The two-meter-one Tracy Murray was a nuclear weapon who punished opponents with outrageous three-pointers;
Magic Johnson, who had scored four points and grabbed three rebounds, was silently determining the floor of the green team's entire starting lineup through his terrifying defensive impact.
As long as he was on the court, the white team's lightning-fast slashers would inexplicably lose their form when they drove into the lane; when the white team's big men tried to establish position, his tremendous lower-body strength would push them farther and farther from the basket.
The perimeter players got credit for the steals, and Radja got credit for the blocks, but every successful defensive possession originated in the all-encompassing defensive net Magic Johnson wove in the paint with his body.
The video room fell utterly silent.
Sam Cassell, whose face had been full of disdain moments earlier, sat straighter and straighter. By the end, he even cast a somewhat stunned glance at the silent, burly Black center in the corner.
No one in the locker room spoke.
Finally, Parish the Old Chief, sitting in the corner with a jacket draped over his shoulders, spoke slowly. "Some jobs, some people spend their whole lives doing. They don't get you stats. They don't get you in the papers. Nobody mentions you when you win. When you lose, you still take the blame."
At that, he suddenly smiled.
It was a complicated smile, with wrinkles like knife cuts at the corners of his eyes. He seemed to be talking about Ervin before him, yet also about his former self, holding the line behind Larry Bird and battling countless muscle-bound bruisers in bone-breaking clashes in the paint.
"Now someone's finally counting them."
The video room went completely quiet.
That settled it.
Even this seasoned veteran great had endorsed the statistical system. Sam Cassell opened his mouth, but ultimately offered no further argument.
Meanwhile, Kevin Garnett, seated at the very edge, stared at the chart, lost in thought.
The nineteen-year-old clenched his fists, and a flame of unprecedented ambition burned in his clear eyes.
For the first time, he realized: in the NBA, even without the ball, taking defense and off-ball play to their utmost limits could make you a supreme defensive anchor who decided whether games were won or lost!
Many years later, when the basketball world began learning to use computers and formulas-defensive impact metrics such as RAPM and DRPM-to reexamine history, people discovered something very interesting.
The famous star centers of the nineties had dazzling statistics, but many of them fared poorly in advanced metrics.
Yet Magic Johnson, who averaged only five or six points and whom almost nobody remembered, appeared near the top of all kinds of defensive impact rankings again and again.
Data did not care who was more famous. It only reflected who truly changed the game.