Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Read Online Free PDF Page B

started putting it on the 82games.com site. So that’s sort of [an example] of breakthroughs and difficulties that these different concepts created.
    “I think [discussions] could certainly be a bit contentious. There are a lot of opinionated people in this field. That certainly hasn’t changed. A fundamental level of respect [existed, though]—especially for those who had contributed over an extended period of time and we’d seen the way their thought process worked.”
    While in today’s professional sports, teams are more frequently hiring independent researchers and/or writers to help with their analytics evaluations, many of these formative discussions were happening prior to the Red Sox hiring James and well before Oliver was hired by the SuperSonics. The idea of moving these types of analyses into the mainstream and then getting hired to implement them for a sports franchise wasn’t very reasonable at the time.
    “I’m sure it was for some people, but it seemed too big of a goal,” Pelton said of the sentiments of those participating. “The idea of getting people that understand the concept of true shooting percentage in there would be a big thing. And obviously, Moneyball kind ofaccelerated things and showed the possibilities in another sport, and that kind of raised the bar in a way.
    “There was a discussion in the intro [of the first Basketball Prospectus we did for the 2009–10 season]—I wrote my own intro—and I think there were eight teams at that point who had someone working for them in the front office or as a consultant to the organization. Now it’s probably twenty-eight or something like that, in a really short period of time.”
    Despite all of the brainpower working to unlock basketball’s deepest secrets, implementation hasn’t been the smoothest path. There are so many hurdles to overcome beyond whether someone can actually collect and analyze the data properly to come up with new, innovative solutions to a basketball problem. Many of those challenges involve communication across nonmath specialists and, at the end of the day, impacting an extremely dynamic sport played by human actors who are not capable of flawless implementation of strategy, even if the strategy itself somehow is flawless.
    Still, Pelton thinks back to the formative days on the board, where everything was new and exciting and still really foreign in a lot of ways, and appreciates how far things have already come.
    “It’s kind of easy sometimes in the process to just see incremental changes and not notice them that much,” he said, “and also see the setbacks and get discouraged by them, but when you actually take those opportunities and can step back and look at the bigger picture and the context of everything, it’s really crazy how quickly this has happened.
    “I mean, the similar revolution in baseball took a couple of decades, at least, and this took about half the time, in part because [baseball] helped pave the way.”

    An October 2005 article in Sports Illustrated by Chris Ballard helped announce the arrival of what we now accept as the modern analytics-enhanced basketball world, and the piece doubles as a genealogy of many of today’s top NBAcoaching and management thinkers.
    Beyond discussing some of Oliver’s work with Seattle, the article mentions twenty-nine-year-old Sam Presti, who was an assistant general manager with the San Antonio Spurs at the time and now is the general manager with the Oklahoma City Thunder. He’s widely cited as one of the sharpest front office people in the league, has an extremely strong draft track record, and also was at the center of perhaps the most impactful trade decision of this decade. It also introduces twenty-seven-year-old Sam Hinkie, who then was a special assistant to Houston Rockets owner Carroll Alexander, and now is the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, where he has been the chief protagonist in one of professional sports’ most debated