This whole thing started because Panini keeps taking terrible pictures of Sonia Citron.

I was sitting in a Whatnot break watching Cam from Midwest Cards open a case of a new 2026 WNBA product. I don’t know Cam personally, but she has pulled some crazy cards for me, so I end up in her breaks pretty regularly. That night I had bought the Jordan Canada spot because she is part of my personal collection, and there were probably 50 or 60 people bouncing in and out of the room while the regular group of us talked shit in the chat. One of the running jokes was how badly Sonia had been done by the photographs Panini selected for her cards. Not bad photographs exactly, just absolutely terrible faces.

Every athlete who has ever been photographed while competing knows what I’m talking about. Freeze someone in the wrong tenth of a second and you can make amyone look like they are fighting for their life. So the first Sonia card of the new product comes out, everybody looks at it, and damn if they didn’t do it to her again. She looked like she was in actual physical pain trying to shoot a basketball. The chat immediately starts laughing and somebody says that someone at Panini must hate Sonia Citron. I happen to know an executive at Panini, so naturally I texted them and started giving them hell about it. Basically, what the hell do y’all have against Sonia, and who keeps choosing these pictures?

It was a joke. Later in the break we found a Sabrina Ionescu card that may have been even worse, so apparently Sonia wasn’t being singled out after all. But one word from that stupid conversation stayed in my head: bias. Not whether somebody at Panini actually hates Sonia Citron, because I obviously don’t think there is some conspiracy inside Panini headquarters to find the most ridiculous facial expression she has ever made (maybe a little). What caught my attention was the question underneath the joke. If I were responsible for selecting those photographs, and I personally liked one player more than another, how would I make sure that preference wasn’t influencing which images I chose?

That is where my brain goes because that is what I have spent most of my professional life doing. Data, market research, advertising and human behavior have been the foundation of my career. I have collected billions of data points and interpreted data for companies where the decisions coming out of that work can be worth millions or billions of dollars. One of the first things you learn when you work with data long enough is that the easiest person in the room to fool is usually yourself. If you want the answer to be A badly enough, you can almost always find a way to make the data tell you A. You can change the wording of a question, select a different sample, emphasize one variable over another or decide that one piece of context matters while another does not.

**bare with me, we will get to basketball in a minute**

That does not always mean someone is lying. Sometimes every number being presented is technically accurate. The problem is that accurate numbers can still be arranged into a misleading conclusion, especially when the person interpreting them already knows what they want the conclusion to be. That is why, before I start almost any meaningful research project, the first bias I try to identify is my own. What do I already believe? What do I want the answer to be? What personal experiences am I bringing into this analysis, and how do I remove as much of that as possible before I start asking questions?

If I cannot get there myself, I bring other people into the process and ask them to check me. I have learned over the years that you cannot eliminate a bias you refuse to admit you have. That is true when you are analyzing consumer behavior for a billion-dollar company, and it is true when you are sitting in a basketball-card break talking about athletes. The stakes are obviously different, but the mechanism is the same. We all bring something into the room before the evidence ever arrives. The question is whether we know it is there.

Later in that same break, an A’ja Wilson card came out and the conversation shifted toward WNBA MVP candidates. We started bouncing through names and talking about who might realistically get votes. That got me thinking about one particular player who has been having a very good season after barely playing the year before because of injuries. From there, my brain jumped to another player in another league who had also gone through an injury-riddled season with an extremely small sample. Different gender, different league, different circumstances, but the same basic question began bothering me: how similar were those two seasons actually?

So I looked.

I did not start with a conclusion and go hunting for statistics that supported it. Because of my training, I try hard not to even decide what I expect the answer to be before I start looking. I knew Player A had shot terribly from three, because everybody knew it. That number had become part of the story surrounding the season. I also knew we were talking about only 20 games, which is roughly a quarter of an NBA season and nowhere near enough time for a shooting percentage to necessarily normalize. Player B had played even fewer games, only 13, and had also been dealing with injuries.

Once I put the numbers side by side, I was genuinely surprised by how close they were.

	PLAYER A	PLAYER B
Games	20	13
Points per game	19.5	16.5
Assists per game	8.1	8.8
Turnovers per game	3.6	5.1
Field goal %	41.0%	36.7%
Three-point %	23.5%	27.9%
Effective FG %	44.1%	44.1%
True shooting %	52.1%	49.1%

Forget who they are for a minute. In fact, don’t even try to guess. Just look at the information in front of you.

Both players had significantly disrupted seasons and both were operating in extremely small samples. Both struggled badly from three, and somehow they finished with the exact same effective field-goal percentage. Player B averaged 0.7 more assists per game, but also turned the ball over 1.5 more times per game. Player A scored more, shot better overall and finished with the higher true-shooting percentage.

If I gave those two anonymous stat lines to someone who understood basketball and asked which player had the more efficient offensive season, I do not think the answer would be particularly controversial. It would be Player A.

That does not mean Player A is the better basketball player, and it does not mean the NBA and WNBA should be compared as if they are identical environments. It does not mean one player’s career is better than the other, or that anything can be extrapolated beyond the specific question I am asking. I am simply asking which of these two injury-riddled offensive seasons was statistically more efficient.

Based on the numbers, the answer is Player A.

What interested me was not even the answer itself. What interested me was knowing that those two seasons had been discussed publicly in very different ways.

That took me away from basketball and back into something I have spent most of my career studying: influence. I have spent somewhere around $100 million in advertising during my professional life, and I have never spent one dollar hoping someone would see an advertisement and feel absolutely nothing. Every dollar had an objective attached to it. We wanted you to click, buy, register, answer, remember, consider something differently or take some other measurable action. That is not sinister. That is advertising.

Years ago, we were doing work for one of the largest beverage companies in the world, and along with the advertising work we started conducting market research to better understand the people consuming a particular product. One of the things we studied was music. We wanted to understand what these consumers listened to, which artists they followed and what patterns existed inside the audience. Once we had enough data, we identified a much narrower group of people who were naturally more predisposed to the message we were trying to deliver. Before that research, it might take nine or ten advertising impressions before we could reliably get someone to take the action we wanted.

With the more precisely identified audience, it took fewer than three.

Think about what that means. If you are already leaning in the direction I want to move you, I do not have to push very hard. If you are not naturally leaning that way, that does not necessarily mean I cannot move you. I may simply have to push more often. Repetition works, and I know that because I have spent a career measuring whether it works. So why would we believe repetition suddenly stops working when the thing being delivered to us is not an advertisement?

Why would we think we are immune when the product being sold is an idea, a narrative or an opinion about another human being?

We are not.

That is where modern media becomes incredibly powerful, and when I say media I am using the word broadly. Journalism is part of it, and it has particular influence because of the authority we assign to it, but this goes far beyond newspapers or television networks. Pick up your phone, open Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, turn on a television, listen to a podcast, drive down the highway, walk through an airport or look at the screens inside a restaurant. Go to a sporting event and look at the jerseys, the LED boards, the naming rights and the timeout promotions. At almost every waking moment, someone is competing for your eyes, your ears, your click, your time and ultimately some small piece of your brain.

Attention is valuable because attention can be converted into behavior. That is the business model.

For a long time, we have talked about the media as though its only responsibility were to deliver information. Maybe there was a time when that idea felt closer to reality, although even then different newspapers, television stations and radio networks competed for different audiences. They were competing for your ears and your eyeballs then. Today they are competing for your phone, your clicks, your screen time and every other measurable piece of your attention. Media companies need subscribers, advertising revenue, ratings, engagement and traffic. That economic reality does not mean every journalist is lying or every story is false, but pretending those incentives do not influence what gets amplified would be ridiculous.

Something can also be completely factual without being representative. That distinction matters. Which stories get selected? Which details become headlines? Which details get buried? Which incidents get repeated for three years while another positive story disappears after a day? What receives one article, and what generates 500 articles, debate segments, social clips, podcasts and reaction pieces? Those decisions shape what the audience eventually believes is important.

A story gets published. Television discusses it, someone clips the television segment, an aggregator posts the clip, a podcast reacts to it, another outlet writes about the reaction, and thousands of people argue about all of it online. Eventually you hear that “everybody is saying” the same thing. But are they? Or did everybody encounter some version of the same original premise and then participate in repeating it?

Volume is not always corroboration. Sometimes volume is simply repetition.

After enough repetition, something important happens psychologically. The information stops feeling like information someone gave you and starts feeling like something you independently know. Then the next piece of information arrives and confirmation bias takes over. If it supports what you already believe, you accept it almost instantly. Of course. I knew it. See, there it is again. If it contradicts what you already believe, suddenly you become a forensic scientist demanding context, examining the source and finding every possible reason why this particular piece of information should not count.

That is human nature. I do it. You do it. Everyone does it.

The danger is when we stop recognizing that we are doing it.

Sports makes this obvious because the stakes are mostly emotional and tribal. We like our teams, so we defend our girls and guys. We hate the rival, so we prosecute theirs. Give two athletes essentially the same behavior and fans can somehow create completely different explanations depending on which uniform each person is wearing. Politics operates the same way at a much more consequential level. Give one side a damaging fact about the other and it becomes conclusive proof of everything they have always believed. Reverse the names and suddenly nuance, context and proportionality become extremely important.

Brands do it too. Why is one leather bag worth several thousand dollars while another is worth a fraction of that? Maybe the first one genuinely is better, but how many people buying it personally conducted a materials, construction and durability analysis before deciding exactly how much better it was? Almost none. The brand filled in part of the answer before the consumer ever touched the product. We have been taught what certain names mean: prestige, quality, success, status, danger, failure, trust and distrust.

Much of that education happened without us ever recognizing that we were in class.

Which brings me back to those two basketball players.

I intentionally kept their names out of this because I wanted the information to exist for a few minutes without the weight of everything you already believe about them.

Player A was Ja Morant.

Player B was Caitlin Clark.

Now ask yourself one question: did anything change?

The statistics did not. Ja did not make another shot when I gave you his name, Caitlin did not commit another turnover, their effective field-goal percentages are still exactly the same, and the sample sizes are still 20 games and 13 games. The injuries did not change either. The only new information I gave you was identity. Yet I would bet that for at least some readers, the interpretation of the evidence shifted almost immediately.

That is the reason I am writing this.

I love Ja Morant. I know Ja, I care about Ja, and I have watched him do things for individuals, children, families and communities that will never generate one-tenth of the attention generated when he does something perceived as wrong. I come into any discussion about him with bias, and I am not pretending otherwise. In fact, recognizing that bias is exactly what my professional training tells me I have to do. I know where mine lives, so I can at least try to account for it.

The other side of the comparison is interesting because I am not particularly a Caitlin Clark fan. I am a South Carolina fan, so I certainly was not rooting for Iowa when she was in college. There are parts of Caitlin’s game I do not personally love, and I heavily value efficiency, particularly assist-to-turnover efficiency. Those are basketball preferences, and I recognize them as exactly that. They do not prevent me from objectively understanding how talented she is.

I have watched Caitlin play in person and I have spoken with her. Off the court, she was just a normal human being. She was kind, she took time to take pictures with kids and signed autographs for them. Whatever opinion I might have about the fiery player I see during competition has nothing to do with whether I can objectively evaluate the person standing in front of me or the basketball player on the floor. If you put those 13 games from 2025 in front of me and tell me they prove Caitlin Clark suddenly cannot shoot or cannot play basketball, get the fuck out of my face. That is ridiculous.

I do not have to be a Caitlin Clark fan to recognize what I have watched with my own eyes. Thirteen injury-disrupted games do not erase everything else we know about her ability. If I can acknowledge my bias toward Ja, acknowledge that Caitlin is not one of my favorite players, remove both long enough to examine the evidence and defend either player when the evidence requires it, why should I expect anything less from everyone else? Maybe the more interesting question is not whether I am biased toward Ja. Maybe it is whether you recognize the bias you bring into the conversation about him.

Most people discussing Ja Morant do not know Ja Morant. You may dislike things he has done, and that is fair. He has done stupid things. He put himself in positions where criticism was justified, and he has taken accountability for those things. I am not asking anyone to erase them or pretend they did not happen. What I am questioning is the point at which legitimate accountability turns into a permanent character sentence.

Imagine the dumbest thing you did when you were 22 or 23 years old. Now imagine it became national news, millions of people discussed it, television debate shows analyzed it, social platforms clipped it and strangers decided what it said about your character, your parents, your intelligence and your future. Then imagine that years later every new thing you did was still interpreted through that period of your life. A bad day is no longer simply a bad day. A disagreement, injury or poor performance is no longer allowed to exist on its own. Each becomes additional confirmation of a conclusion that was already reached years earlier.

Eventually nobody is evaluating what happened today. They are evaluating how neatly today fits inside the character they already created for you.

My experience with Ja gives me access to a completely different information set. During the first season of Twelve Time, Ja invited all three of our teams, including the players and their parents, on a four-day trip to the mountains near Dollywood. Transportation, hotels, food and activities were covered. More importantly, he did not write a check and disappear. He was there with everyone.

At one dinner, we essentially took over a restaurant. Everybody ordered what they wanted, and the staff knew Ja was coming, so members of the kitchen crew were wearing Ja Morant jerseys. Ja went into the back, met everyone, took pictures with them and thanked them. At the end of the dinner, he left the largest number I have personally ever seen written on a tip line. I am intentionally not telling you the amount because the number is not the point. The point is that I have watched versions of that story happen over and over again when there was no need for his name to be attached to them.

I have watched family members deliver things to hospitals. I have seen fans helped financially or sent gear without the entire thing becoming a publicity campaign. I have watched Ja invest time into kids when there was no camera around and no obvious marketing value to doing it. I also understand the obvious response to those stories: of course I am going to tell you good things about somebody I love. That is a legitimate reason to question my perspective, which is exactly why the stories from people who did not begin with my bias are more interesting.

One conversation that has always stayed with me was with Matt P., a player’s father who has been with Ja and my EYBL team since day one. When we interviewed him about Twelve Time, Matt was honest that before becoming involved with the program, his perception of Ja was not particularly great. He did not know Ja. His opinion was based on the information available to him through the media, just like most people’s opinions are. Then his son became part of Ja’s world, Matt watched how the family operated, he saw how they treated his son, and he saw Ja personally reach out to his son simply to check on him.

His perception changed.

That does not prove every negative story about Ja was false. It does not mean Matt suddenly discovered some giant media conspiracy. It means he formed one opinion using one information set, then received a substantially richer information set through firsthand experience and arrived at a different conclusion. As someone who has spent most of his professional life working with data, that is fascinating to me. The quality and breadth of the information changed, and so did the conclusion.

Most of us never get that second information set.

We never meet the athlete, politician, CEO or celebrity we talk about. We never visit the neighborhood we have an opinion about. We never sit down with the people whose lives we debate. We get the version that reaches us through television, websites, social media, algorithms, advertising and whatever else is competing for our attention that day. Then we form an opinion and, after enough repetition, begin to experience that opinion as something we created completely on our own.

That is where this stopped being an essay about Ja Morant and Caitlin Clark for me.

They are the example, not the subject.

If repetition can manufacture our perception of an athlete we have never met, what else do we think we decided for ourselves? What people do you distrust, and why? What people do you admire? What does success look like to you, and who gave you that picture? What makes someone attractive, dangerous, intelligent, wealthy or respectable? What makes a neighborhood good, a school elite, a job prestigious or a particular political issue feel more important than every other problem happening around us?

How many of those conclusions came completely from your own experience?

How many were reinforced inside you one impression at a time?

I have spent enough money in advertising to know that nobody has to completely change your mind in one shot. Sometimes it takes nine or ten impressions. Sometimes it takes only two or three because you were already predisposed to agree with the message. That same human brain does not somehow become immune when the source is journalism, politics, branding, social media or an algorithm. In fact, today those systems increasingly feed one another.

A headline gets your attention, the algorithm notices, and it gives you more of the same. You engage with that, so it gives you even more. Eventually your feed starts to look like evidence that the entire world agrees with you. Then you meet somebody whose feed has spent the last two years teaching them the exact opposite, and both of you walk into the conversation convinced the other person has completely lost their mind.

Somewhere along the way, we forget something pretty basic.

We are all pretty damn similar.

Maybe if we understood how aggressively everyone is competing to influence us, we would be a little less certain that every thought inside our heads was independently created there. Maybe we would question our own side occasionally. Maybe we would give people enough room to become more than the worst thing we have heard about them. Maybe we would spend slightly less time looking for confirmation that the people we already dislike are terrible and slightly more time asking why we dislike them in the first place.

I am not asking you to like Ja Morant. I am not asking you to like Caitlin Clark, and I am definitely not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to do something I have to force myself to do every day when I look at data: identify your bias, then ask where it came from.

Because before you decide you hate somebody you have never met, it might be worth asking who introduced you.

More love, less hate.