"Physicians began to realize that disease classification was actually much more complex," Muthu said. "By doing so, for the first time in the history of the world, physicians became more than just spiritual healers. They could actually save lives." He paused, not too dramatically, and made his point: "Today, I believe basketball is on the verge of a similar revolution."

Over the next half-hour he explained why. Muthu’s conclusion was that NBA players account for thirteen positions, not just the five traditional roles, and he thought this discovery wasn’t just academic. It could alter the way all basketball players are evaluated and make people like Morey fundamentally rethink the way they assemble teams.

Not long afterward, Morey took the stage in the spacious ballroom to present the conference’s awards. Bill James, the godfather of sabermetrics, who published advanced baseball research as early as the 1970s and inspired the last three decades of innovation in sports, won for lifetime achievement. The Tampa Bay Rays scored the award for best organization. The reigning NBA champion Dallas Mavericks were also honored. And then Morey announced to polite applause the prize for the conference’s best EOS talk. The winner was Muthu Alagappan.

Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager lionized in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, once turned down an athletic scholarship from Stanford and instead was drafted in the first round out of high school by the New York Mets. Four years later, he made the big leagues.

No one would ever confuse Muthu for Billy Beane. "As an Indian kid in Houston, basketball is what you do," Muthu said. "I tried out for my middle-school team and didn’t make it. That was the start of me realizing I was not made to play basketball." Instead he played tennis and thrived nationally as a debater in high school. At Stanford, he danced Raas and Bhangra, traditional Indian styles, and biked to class. When he did find time for basketball, about once a week, Muthu played point guard. There was no other choice for a 5-foot-9 guy with a slight build. But he also felt out of position, since ball-handling was not his strength. Even in pickup games, he thought, there was an unrecognized nuance to basketball positions.

Muthu began his deep dive into NBA positions one Friday last summer, during his internship with Ayasdi, by picking seven rudimentary statistics on Yahoo! Sports for every NBA player: points, rebounds, assists, steals, turnovers, fouls, and blocks. Then he adjusted them for playing time. Within three hours, he had a graphic with dense groups of color-coded nodes, representing last season’s NBA players, connected by lines, expressing statistical affinities. The nodes were the players, the groups were the newfound positions, and the lines linked statistically similar players. This was his groundbreaking similarity network of NBA players. It looked like a postcard from a molecular biology convention.

"We expected to see five categories, or five flares, corresponding to the five positions of basketball. We actually found something much more interesting: We found that there’s thirteen positions in the NBA," he said at the MIT conference. "And for each position, for the first time, I can topologically and mathematically define what it means to play that position. I can tell you which players in the NBA play which position. And I can tell you who epitomizes the position best."

The first thing to know about the thirteen NBA positions—Muthu labeled them offensive ball-handler, defensive ball-handler, combo ball-handler, shooting ball-handler, role-playing ball-handler, 3-point rebounder, scoring rebounder, paint protector, scoring paint protector, role player, NBA first team, NBA second team, and one-of-a-kind—is that the idea of thirteen NBA positions is a misnomer. Anyone who’s ever watched basketball knows that there are more than thirteen positions, and not even Isaiah Thomas would put together a team based solely on five positions. Indeed, the best basketball players are like soccer midfielders: They can function anywhere on the court, they make their teams better, and they’re not defined by position. But Muthu’s positions weren’t all that rigid. Tony Parker is an offensive ball-handler, which separates him from John Wall, considered a combo ball-handler, not based on anything stylistic but solely because of their statistics. Tyson Chandler, the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, is a paint protector who specializes on one side of the floor. Kevin Love and Blake Griffin are actually scoring paint protectors. Some players are in a league of their own: Kevin Durant and LeBron James, for example, are NBA first-teamers. Derrick Rose and Dwight Howard are one-of-a-kinders whose statistical combinations make them NBA outliers.