A "Moneyball" statician predicted Jeremy Lin's success 2 years ago
What surprises me most about this story isn't that it happened, but that people still are surprised it works.  A data-driven approach will always be better than picking people by how good they "look", etc.  Human scouts are biased, make mistakes, and miss plays.  Statistics don't lie.  The one catch is of course how you analyze those statistics makes all the difference.