Over the summer, each of the NBA's 30 teams assembled a roster informed by some of the smartest experts in professional sports. The best basketball scouts in the world studied players to identify skills that could help their teams.
Analytic departments performed deep dives into hundreds of names to uncover undervalued players who can add wins on the margins. Salary cap gurus considered the long-term risks that accompany roster candidates. Medical specialists examined health histories to ensure that their teams wouldn't waste valuable resources on talent that will never see the floor at 100 percent.
Yet for all the fancy new tools and innovative systems NBA organizations employ, they still don't have a reliable way to measure what might be the most important element of all -- chemistry.