Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (16 page)

The league has engaged P3 to come to the Draft Combine. The players are being tested, and it’s their bodies being diagnosed. The teams are the employers of these players and are investing significant amounts of money in them. It’s a very difficult and nuanced question that raises some of the same issues as blood-testing and sleep-tracking data, as some players will greatly be helped by early diagnosis of structural issues while others could suffer economic consequences from the leak of such data. As Elliott notes, there’s even debate as to what category of data this analysis falls under: Is it more akin to the bench press at the Draft Combine (which is released publicly) or like an MRI, which has much more distribution protection on it?

“Originally, [the NBA] planned to give the data to the team, and they’ve come around to which is what I think is our position—well, I know it’s our position—that the data should rest with the players,” Elliott said. “The players control it, it’s their bodies, and they should have control of this information. And we’re going to encourage the
players—especially those who have significant pathologies—to share the data with the teams, but there won’t be a mandate. The teams will only get this information if the players requested to share a copy with them.

“This is about protecting the players, this rare resource that these guys are, and they didn’t have access to this before,” he added. “They just waited until their bodies broke. Now they have access and they can cut off some of these [injuries] and it’s amazing for the players. If the Players Association is going to rebel against this, it kind of undercuts the whole project.”

As all of this develops, teams are getting increasingly interested in working more in concert with P3, which is focusing more on the collection and analysis of the data, and less on having physical training actually at their own gym. The corrective work, with the proper oversight and equipment, can occur anywhere, and as the salaries paid to individual players continue to rise rapidly thanks to the league’s new TV rights deal, teams are more and more concerned about protecting their investments to the best extent possible. Players and their agents are increasingly interested in this, as well, as tens of millions of dollars can be at stake on their side, too—even as everyone continues to try to figure out what it all means, and who exactly should know what about whom.

“Just the idea of trying to perfect athletes in the NBA, it’s so timely right now,” Elliott said. “It’s unlike any of the other sports, and it’s changing so fast. Honestly, I think it’s the biggest sort of imperfect market that there is in basketball still, this piece that hasn’t been optimized yet. They went from having no real training culture to saying this is maybe the most important piece that we have. They’ve gone from zero to sixty in like three seconds.”

CHAPTER 6

The Tricky Art and Science of Turning Data into Wins

            
It really starts with leadership’s appetite for that kind of information . . . the owner, the head of team operations . . . the head coach. . . . If anyone of those, particularly the head coach, is . . . not open to this, it’s useless. It really comes down to where the rubber meets the road and where the decision makers are willing to legitimately give this stuff weight.

—Tom Penn, ESPN basketball analyst

A
n hour or so before a mid-November 2014 home date with the New Orleans Pelicans, Sacramento Kings general manager Pete D’Alessandro was standing against a wall just off the tunnel that leads from the home team’s locker room to the court at Sleep Train Arena. At the time, D’Alessandro was in the early stages of his second season with the Kings after coming over from Denver, where he was an assistant to Masai Ujiri (who then became the general manager of the Toronto Raptors), and things were going unexpectedly well for his team.

Six months earlier, the Kings had been the talk of the league for off-court reasons when they openly engaged in a crowdsourcing analysis exercise ahead of the 2014 NBA Draft, in which they held
the No. 8 overall pick. The Kings were open-minded to all sorts of analysis and ideas that came from outside their management team, and entertained numerous strategies about which player to take with the pick or whether they should try to trade up or down in the first round.

Eventually, ESPN’s
Grantland
site documented the team’s experiment in a short film, which showed a variety of interesting and awkward interactions among Kings
officials. For basketball fans, the juiciest part of the film was the disclosure that Sacramento was very much considering Louisiana-Lafayette point guard Elfrid Payton against their eventual selection, Michigan shooting guard Nik Stauskas, but ultimately decided they needed more quality shooting to help space the floor around blossoming star center DeMarcus Cousins.

By November, though, the Kings were making news on the court, where they were one of the early surprises of the season. They had compiled a 6–4 record against a very difficult schedule, and were coming off a home win over the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, during which Cousins had his way with all-time great Tim Duncan down the stretch. Furthermore, a widely questioned pair of summer moves—when the club allowed diminutive scoring point guard Isaiah Thomas to leave via free agency, and then signed the older, less dynamic Darren Collison for similar money—was paying early dividends. Collison was bringing much more stability and defense to the point guard position, in addition to a better understanding of Cousins’s role as the team’s star, rather than needing the ball in his hands as Thomas did to be effective.

The day before this particular encounter, news had surfaced that another Kings’ gamble had paid off. Eleven months earlier, the team had traded for small forward Rudy Gay, whose low-efficiency offensive game made him one of the analytics community’s poster children for how you
didn’t
want to play. Gay was on his third team in a year after moving from the Memphis Grizzlies to Toronto in a previous trade, and was more or less considered to be an albatross, on a
contract that was paying him over $17 million a season. The conventional thought process was Gay was being paid far too much money for what he was producing in a league where salary caps and luxury taxes have significant effects on both team-building and roster preservation, if things are going well.

Gay, though, was evolving his offensive game under second-year head coach Michael Malone, who had been brought in a few weeks before D’Alessandro by owner Vivek Ranadive in the summer of 2013. Malone was utilizing Gay a lot more in the post and deriving excellent early results. Gay was shooting the ball more efficiently, getting to the free throw line more than he historically did, and providing the Kings with some late-game mismatch advantages, as Gay often found himself posting up a smaller forward.

The Kings moved quickly and got Gay to accept a three-year extension for about $40 million, which was much more appropriate market value for him, given his improved performance and the pending increase in the NBA’s national TV deals, which will see the cap increase from around $70 million for the 2015–16 season to perhaps $110 million for the 2017–18 season. Under the new financial structure for the league, Gay’s new deal approximates a deal worth $9 million or so in the 2014–15 environment, and even analytics folks are more than OK with that value.

All of these types of decisions—the hiring of a coach and general manager, free-agency decisions, trade choices—are very complicated and have to be made in concert across an organization. When done correctly, with the Spurs being the most widely held example, they can produce symbiotic beauty and extended excellence, but in the wrong setting, conflicting egos and agendas can quickly rip a franchise apart. As D’Alessandro noted before this Pelicans game, the educated risks the Kings took over his first eighteen months are the type a franchise like Sacramento—far from a premier free-agent destination—needs to pull itself out of a decade-long mire after nearly winning the NBA title in the early 2000s.

“Look, if Rudy Gay is playing in Toronto right now and is a free agent next year, what chance do we have to sign him to a three-year deal, like we just did? We don’t have a chance to do that. We don’t,” D’Alessandro said.

Throw in the club’s decision to offer Cousins—who had struggled with maturity and frustration issues even as he began to emerge as the most gifted center in the league—a five-year maximum extension the year before, and the Kings were running very hot on roster-building gambles. The team’s philosophy on Cousins was simple: you don’t get your hands on talents like him very often, and once management decided to make him the centerpiece of the organization, they had to treat him as such financially instead of asking him to wait and prove he could live up to that kind of deal.

There was risk involved in investing so much money in a young player who had made some mistakes in comportment, but it was a reasonable risk given the potential upside.

“We’re not a big market,” D’Alessandro said about Sacramento’s standing in a league with franchises in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, and many other large, desirable cities. “So, [we need to] be willing to seem stupid, because you have to do things that maybe are on the fringe of what other teams can do. And you do them with the idea that [only] some are going to work. Even in the deals I’ve done so far, some have worked, some haven’t.

“As a GM here, I have to be much more willing to say, ‘Don’t be wedded to your ideas.’ [Owner] Vivek [Ranadive] has a saying like, ‘Do you want to be right, or do you want to be successful?’ So be willing to acknowledge that, hey—and I think here, especially, in small markets—you need to be able to work those edges and be willing to be wrong and put yourself out there and say, ‘It’s OK, because the next one, I might be right and it might be a bigger thing.’”

After Ujiri left Denver for a return home to Toronto (and a much bigger paycheck), it was expected by many that D’Alessandro would inherit the general manager role in Denver to carry on the
Nuggets’ success. That was even after ownership—which had officially transitioned from Stan Kroenke to his son, Josh, to satisfy NFL cross-ownership requirements involving Kroenke’s St. Louis Rams—had dismissed NBA coach of the year George Karl after a 57-win 2012–13 season that ended prematurely in a first-round playoff loss to the Golden State Warriors.

D’Alessandro admits he was deep in the process to finalize an agreement with the Nuggets, but a deal still hadn’t been reached when Ranadive, who bought the Kings in 2013, repeatedly called to offer D’Alessandro an interview for the open Kings position. Sacramento had been searching for a general manager for a number of weeks, so D’Alessandro didn’t expect the interview to be much more than a chance to continue to grow his own experience set.

In fact, the possible alliance got off to an awkward start when D’Alessandro, who had just finished putting his presentation together around midnight the night before he was set to fly to Sacramento the next morning, got an e-mail from Ranadive detailing what the owner wanted to discuss in the sit-down. D’Alessandro says he pulled an allnighter to assemble the new materials, got an hour of sleep, and flew out to meet with Ranadive, where the two had a very open exchange of ideas and questions about how to rebuild the Kings. D’Alessandro walked out of the meeting feeling like he wasn’t going to get the job, since Sacramento was so far along in its own process, but that he told his wife that he “had a friend here. I know that, because the guy’s a great dude.”

Soon after, D’Alessandro was hired to help lead the Kings’ revolution, which continues to include unique and sometimes offbeat concepts about how to improve the team. The example that got the most media attention (and ridicule) during 2014–15 was Ranadive’s public admission that he wanted the team to consider a four-on-five defensive strategy with a basket-hanger who would remain at the offensive end of the floor. Most NBA observers believe this approach would get shredded in the long run as teams countered defensively
and
exploited the greater space of four-on-four basketball at their offensive end, but to D’Alessandro, the ideas weren’t the thing in Sacramento. It was the process of discovering them.

“I think Vivek has had a really open approach, an approach that—and I do this in my office, too—anyone in the office, all the young guys running around, can walk in my door and say, ‘I have an idea’ and throw it at me,” he said. “Anytime. I don’t care if you work at the front desk. And everyone knows that. It’s funny to me, you find that personalities start to shine that way. I find that you start to see things in people that maybe you didn’t envision before.

“Because ideas are where it all starts, and so I think Vivek is an incredible ideas guy,” D’Alessandro added. “He comes up with these ideas, and they blow me away every time. We’re just having a meeting, and Vivek’s going to come in, we’re going to be doing some stuff that we’re going to send to the league, and I told someone, ‘Have a notepad, write down everything he says,’ because when he says it, sometimes, I’m like, ‘Oh c’mon.’ And then I’ll go back and think about some of the stuff he said and like, you know, there’s a germ of an idea that you can turn into something big.”

The Kings continued to push resources into better and more creative decision making with the fall 2014 hiring of Dean Oliver, the father of the modern analytics movement, from his role as director of production analytics at ESPN. Ranadive, like a number of new NBA owners, made his fortune in technology, so the work of Oliver and his charges were to be a rapidly increasing portion of what the Kings considered as they weighed their next risk/reward decisions, and the whole management team, including more-traditional advisors like former NBA star Chris Mullin, were to become more aligned philosophically.

“We’re in our infancy, we’re in year one, we can’t have it all done, and Dean just came on,” D’Alessandro said at the time. “I think we’ll have a fast infancy because I think we have really qualified people, and
I think we have an incredible support cast in our ownership group. So in that regard, I feel really good about where we’re positioned.

“But, in the way I’m looking at it, there’s so much of it that we have already, the question is: How do you use it? And how does each area use it? And I think, as the general manager, I’m trying to figure out how to create the most flexible way of having [the data] tell its story.”

Unfortunately for D’Alessandro, and perhaps the Kings, the story would quickly take a very different turn.

What seemed like a solid plan that was being implemented well started to unravel a couple of weeks after this conversation. What exactly went down over the next six months isn’t 100 percent known, but the craziness started when the team elected to dismiss Malone in late November, during a period when Cousins was out of the lineup with viral meningitis. There was much debate at the time about whether management favored a faster tempo than what Malone was playing with a roster designed for more of a halfcourt approach, and local and national media differed on whether D’Alessandro or Ranadive himself was responsible for the move.

Subsequently, the Kings promoted assistant coach Ty Corbin to interim head coach, may or may not have asked Mullin to take over as coach, elected to make Corbin the coach for the rest of the season, kept losing games and looked terrible in the process, were forced to remove Corbin from the job, and eventually hired Karl, with whom D’Alessandro had worked in Denver.

None of it really made any sense, and it all became more confusing when Ranadive brought back former Kings center Vlade Divac in a front-office role and then quickly handed the basketball operations over to him without telling anyone else. Mullin quickly left the Kings to take the head coaching job at St. John’s, his alma mater, and D’Alessandro, having been neutered, quietly returned to Denver after the season to take a business and team operations role under owner Josh Kroenke. In late July 2015, it was reported that the Kings would
be releasing Oliver, while also looking for a new analytics person to replace him. They did well to land Roland Beech, but it still was very curious.

The whole Kings saga is a cautionary tale of mismanagement, but there was a lot going into the buildup of the analytics approach that was worthwhile. All of the decisions they made—swapping out Thomas for Collison, gambling on Gay, maxing out Cousins, the debate over tempo, and so forth—were rooted in analytics as part of a team-building plan. Maybe Divac and his staff will find a method that works—and they need to quickly, because they (perhaps recklessly) invested a lot of the Kings’ future in some third-tier free agents for the 2015–16 season—but there clearly was a breakdown in the process with the old regime.

Sacramento’s journey to wonk and back is illustrative in an exploration of how analytics move through an organization, and how many things can derail them. The next section provides some additional perspectives, from different layers involved in this kind of decision making and implementation.