In a radio interview on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Clippers’ newest front-office hire described his qualifications as follows: “You have the analytical side, which I know absolutely nothing about. There’s the collective-bargaining agreement, which I know nothing about. As far as evaluating players and their talent level, I know nothing about that, either, O.K.? If I went into a gym, I couldn’t tell you who’s good, who’s bad—anything.” The speaker was Lee Jenkins, a longtime basketball writer for Sports Illustrated, who never played the sport as a child and who is known for writing observant features about the lives of star players like Jimmy Butler (“His favorite time of year is ‘grimy season,’ an unspecified stretch of summer and fall when he braids his hair, grows his beard and works out twice a day, hot yoga in between”) and Kawhi Leonard (“He is 24 but looks significantly older, like a man with a mortgage heading to the graveyard shift”). Jenkins is a profile artist, possessing an eye for detail and a facility for winning the trust of people who have little in common with him. When LeBron James decided to return to Cleveland, in 2014, he gave the scoop to Jenkins, who wrote an as-told-to that read, at times, like a Nike commercial. The Clippers surprised many people in both the basketball and journalism communities this week by making Jenkins their executive director of research and identity, a job title without precedent, to say nothing of comprehensibility.

The research part, at least, isn’t hard to imagine. Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations, told the Los Angeles Times that he envisions Jenkins meeting with prospects in advance of the draft, for instance, and, essentially, interviewing them. Call it reportorial scouting, or, as Jenkins told me on Thursday, focussing “on the ‘who,’ instead of on the ‘what.’ ” Consider this passage from Jenkins’s Kawhi Leonard profile:

When Leonard arrived in San Antonio almost five years ago, the Spurs did not know much about him personally. Even scouts, who conduct famously comprehensive background checks, found him difficult to pin down. They were aware he was a physical marvel, 6'7" with a 7'3" wingspan and 11-inch hands, too strong to screen and too long to elude. He was a worker who took his own lamps to 6:30 a.m. sessions at San Diego State's Viejas Arena, when the lights were off. He lost his dad at 16—Mark Leonard was shot and killed at the car wash he owned in Compton—but Kawhi's self-effacing manner goes back much further. He never even liked celebrating his birthday.

In this post-“Moneyball” era, many sports franchises have gone to great lengths to maximize their statistical focus, in some cases hiring journalists with a quantitative bent. Just last year, to much less fanfare, Jenkins’s friend Luke Winn left Sports Illustrated, where he’d covered college basketball, to fill a new position created by the Toronto Raptors—director of prospect strategy—that seems to combine old-fashioned scouting with the contemporary vogue for analytics. (“I probably picked up the phone ten times during this process, like, ‘I should call Luke right now,’ ” Jenkins told me. “But I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like I was at the N.B.A. job fair.”) It stands to reason that there may now be comparative advantages, however small, to be gained from concentrated efforts to assess the intangibles with an outsider’s eyes: about the extent to which boys from chaotic households may become men who crave order in their daily routines, say, or about the predictive nature of automobile preferences.

I raised this notion with Bill James, who is often thought of as the intellectual godfather of the “Moneyball” movement, and who still works as a senior adviser to the Red Sox, having long since surrendered some of his independence as a critic in pursuit of the purer glory of wins over losses. He wrote back, “The money that you pay to players is SO big, hundreds of millions a year in the case of the Red Sox, that anything you do to reduce the chance of a mistake can reasonably pay for itself. If Jenkins could interview the player/candidates, get a sense of their motivations and focus, it doesn’t seem improbable that his sense of where their career is going might be valuable to the organization.” He also mentioned that Michael Lewis, the author of “Moneyball,” once proposed to him that, given their dependence on the habits and personalities of nineteen- and twenty-year-old males, the asset that professional teams could most stand to benefit from is “a bunch of college girls” with the skills of reporters: “people who would find out everything there is to find out about an athlete,” as James put it.

When I asked Lewis about this, he told me that he’d gone so far as to suggest the idea to Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, when he was working on the book. The scouts in the A’s organization, he said, “made a fetish of going to games and sitting behind home plate. They had weird taboos about interacting with the players in any way. But the players’ stats spoke for themselves. On the other hand, all this information that the team actually wants is something that a really crafty female reporter is ideally suited to getting out of young men. It has to do with their habits: Do they work hard? Are they comfortable away from home?” Beane dismissed the idea, Lewis said. “But all of the sports leagues do experiments with psychological testing,” he went on. “Daryl Morey”—the G.M. of the Houston Rockets and a founder of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, at M.I.T.—“has gone through every charlatan there is, and found no value in it. With a journalist, you just get to know the players. It’s not complicated.”