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

by Andy Glockner

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

  Copyright © 2016 by Andy Glockner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210

  Designed by Jeff Williams

  Set in 11.5-point Minion Pro by the Perseus Books Group

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2016

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-306-82403-6

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Note: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. This book is intended only as an informative guide for those wishing to know more about health issues. In no way is this book intended to replace, countermand, or conflict with the advice given to you by your own physician. The ultimate decision concerning care should be made between you and your doctor. We strongly recommend you follow his or her advice. Information in this book is general and is offered with no guarantees on the part of the authors or Da Capo Press. The authors and publisher disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Bernard King, Chris Mullin, Walter Berry, countless nights in the Palestra, and everything and everyone else that made me fall in love with basketball, a perfect sport filled with imperfections

  CONTENTS

  Prologue Perfected Players

  Chapter 1 A Brief History of Modern Basketball Analytics

  Chapter 2 The Basketball Technology Revolution

  Chapter 3 Analytics Believers and Doubters

  Chapter 4 The Hunt for Future Perfected Players

  Chapter 5 Faster, Stronger, More Explosive

  Chapter 6 The Tricky Art and Science of Turning Data into Wins

  Chapter 7 How the NBA’s Best Teams Were Built

  Chapter 8 No Single Path to Mining Talent

  Chapter 9 The World’s Most Perfected Player

  Epilogue The Warriors Come Out to Play

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  Perfected Players

  One of the most important moments of the 2014–15 NBA season happened three months before it even started. Amid the myriad practices, meetings, and team functions related to the tryout camp for the US national team that was being put together to compete in the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup in Spain, one small thought on shooting technique was passed along from one world-class player to another. That disclosure set in motion improvements that amplified the latter player’s impact on his whole team, and helped change the entire dynamic of the NBA’s championship chase.

  There was no way to know that at the time, though, as the focus of anyone who was observing the tryout camp at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’s glittering Mendenhall Center practice facility that July was on the battles to make the tournament roster. For five days, a sizable contingent of local, national, and international media looked on along with dozens of invited basketball luminaries as the nineteen hopefuls went through drills and scrimmages under the watchful eyes of USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo, national team head coach Mike Krzyzewski, and his coaching staff. Despite a number of the NBA’s elite players deciding to pass on trying out for the non-Olympics event, the roster still was loaded with young, world-class talent.

  The headliner was Kevin Durant, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s newly minted NBA most valuable player, who seemed to flow around the courts in all of his long-limbed scoring glory. There was former teammate, James Harden, now an established superstar for the Houston Rockets after a landmark 2012 trade that redefined both of those teams. There was emerging Indiana Pacers small forward Paul George, who had helped lead his team to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference in 2014 despite the presence of two-time defending NBA champions LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and others in Miami.

  There also were the Golden State Warriors’ “Splash Brothers,” Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson; blossoming point guard studs like the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Kyrie Irving, and the Washington Wizards’ John Wall; prodigious post presences in the Detroit Pistons’ Andre Drummond and the Sacramento Kings’ DeMarcus Cousins; plus Chicago Bulls lead guard Derrick Rose, a former league MVP himself who was trying to get back from multiple knee injuries that had handcuffed a series of very good Bulls teams.

  The energy levels during the scrimmages equaled the talent levels on the courts. Guys were going at each other hard. World-class players don’t often get summer environments in which they can compete day after day against others of their caliber, and the opportunity to watch and learn from peers at the game’s highest level can mean as much to the furthering of a career as making the final roster actually does.

  One of the highlights of the camp was a post-practice series of one-on-one games between Durant, Harden, and George. Each of the trio took turns starting with the ball, with one attempt to score on the defender. If the bucket was made, the scorer stayed on the court to face the player sitting out, who would come on as the defender. If he missed, the defender then got the ball and the chance to score against the player who had been resting. Even with dozens of people milling around on the sidelines and baseline, just a few feet away from the action, the games were pretty focused and intense, with each star testing his best moves against two of the few equals they have.

  There were plenty of these kinds of on-court battles at the camp. The whole week was somewhat of a referendum on the pecking order of the new generation of scoring point guards that were fueling the NBA’s surge in watchability. The same was true of the big men. Traditional post players like Cousins and Drummond were testing each other against a legit foe, and the Denver Nuggets’ hyperkinetic Kenneth Faried rebounded everything in sight. All the while, the specter of the NBA’s Next Big Thing—the New Orleans Pelicans’ Anthony Davis—loomed very large.

  While all of these players battle for honors during the season, the communal goal of the national team setup makes the camps a lot less confrontational, and it’s a chance for the best of the best to crib good stuff from others. It may be the way a dribbler sets up his crossover, or how to come off a screen to provide the extra inches of room that’s all world-class players need to catch a pass and bury a jumper. Players at this level will see something they like, ask about it, and then quietly incorporate it into their games, making them even deadlier going forward.

  A good example of this came to light in an ESPN.com column in January 2015, w
here Ethan Sherwood Strauss broke down some of the new things Klay Thompson had added to his offensive game for the 2014–15 season. One of them was dubbed the “Aussie-go-round,” where Thompson cribbed from a USA Basketball teammate and learned to use his inside arm to grab big man Andrew Bogut around the waist when curling around a Bogut screen. The slingshot effect would propel Thompson forward too quickly for the trailing defender to recover. In the video clip embedded in the story, Thompson came up the right wing from the baseline and then tightly curled around Bogut, who was holding the ball. Defensive help wasn’t able to rotate over quickly enough, and Bogut fed a simple pass to Thompson for a driving layup attempt, on which he was fouled.

  Often, this type of adoption comes from players seeing something they like in a game or one of the practices. But sometimes, it’s just a quick chat about basketball philosophy that does the trick.

  Months after the national team camp had ended, one of the players who had participated was sitting on a metal folding chair off to the side of the practice court at his team’s facility, recounting the conversation that had helped change him for the better.

  “This is crazy, you’ll like this,” the player said. “So, I was talking to Kevin Durant—I ask people, from time to time, good shooters, ‘When you’re off, what is the thing you go back to?’ Not that I ask everybody, just from time to time you just talk to someone and ask. And Kevin Durant said, ‘I need to be in my heels. So when I’m in my heels, I’m stronger. I want my heels to be solid on the ground as I’m shooting.’

  “I said, ‘I’ve never heard that before.’ This was just last summer at the USA thing, and so I was kind of playing around with it, and it was during that camp—which probably wasn’t the time to play around with it—but I was trying to feel my heels while I was shooting, and there’s something to it. Because when you’re on your toes, your balance isn’t there, but you don’t want to be with your toes up, because you don’t want to be fading back.

  “That’s why a lot of us miss all of our shots is because we get lazy in our core, and we’re kind of curled back, or we’ve got our shoulders back, or our weight is somehow just a little bit back, and we [leave them] short. We miss our shots short all the time, and a lot of it’s just because, I believe, of our body posture in our shot.”

  The player then rose from his chair and started to demonstrate what he was talking about, first leaning forward onto his forefeet, with his body slightly following suit, and then showing the difference in body posture when his heels were solid on the ground at the start of a shooting motion.

  “I feel if I’m engaged, I like to try to be bent just barely forward—so it was really interesting,” he said. “I was just like, ‘Wow.’ It was hard for me, kind of, to be in my heels to go. I mean, I can get on my heels, but to do it, it felt like everything was going to tip backwards. But sometimes, it would feel right. I would feel strong.”

  The player was interested in what he had been told and what he was feeling when he first tried it out, but he needed to figure out a way to make the movement natural to him, and allow him to incorporate it into his full-speed basketball actions. He felt some comfort immediately while doing it on catch-and-shoot chances, since on those plays you’re already standing in the spot from where you will lift off. Working the new technique into his shots when he was on the move, though, took some significant alteration of his established workout routines.

  “One of my movements that’s been tough for me has been step-ups,” he said, referencing longstanding issues he’s had with one of his knees. “Usually, it’ll hurt for the first two reps, and then I’ll kind of get into a groove and then I can do them, but you can’t do that in a game all the time. You don’t always get a couple of reps; you kind of do because you’re running around, but I need to feel good the first time. I want to feel good the first time I’m trying to do something, because you get stiff in a game, use a timeout, come out, and you gotta go shoot right away.”

  The player first incorporated heel-loading movements into his leg lifting routines. Then he began to practice them every time he went down the stairs in his house, reinforcing the weight distribution and technique of “being solid in his heels” to muscle memory. The technique changes eventually took, and not only did his shooting consistency improve in all aspects of his game, but unexpectedly, his knee felt increasingly better.

  “I had no intention of [it helping my knee],” he said. “I was really just looking out about my shot. I’m just having a conversation, it wasn’t even about trying to figure anything out. I was talking to someone, and then I was just playing with it, right? And then it turned into this.”

  “This” was one of the greatest shooting seasons in NBA history, and one of the stories this book is all about.

  • Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James, widely considered to be the best basketball player in the world, shot 22.7 percent on 110 3-point attempts during the playoffs.

  • Stephen Curry, the league’s most explosive shooter, shot five-for-twenty-three in a Finals loss, capping off a four-game stretch in which he converted just twenty-nine of eighty-three shot attempts.

  • James Harden committed a playoff-record twelve turnovers in the Rockets’ final game of the postseason.

  These (with a hat-tip to Anthony Davis, the Pelicans’ freak of nature) were the three best basketball players in the world during the 2014–15 NBA season. All three were named first-team All-NBA, Curry won the league’s MVP award, and all three led their teams to the conference finals, with Curry and James meeting in the championship series. And yet, they are all capable of nights and stretches like those listed above, even when the games matter the most.

  Yes, NBA superstars push as close to perfection as we’re likely to see, but they are few and far between. There are 450 roster spots in the NBA each season, and the farther you get from the league’s top echelon of talent (which includes maybe 10 percent of the players), the more it’s up to the players—and their teams—to develop and utilize their strengths while diminishing and masking weaknesses as much as possible. There are no perfect basketball players, but there are plenty of perfected ones, who start with a basis of skill and physical ability and then are refined further and further in order to move closer and closer to their absolute potential.

  The concept of players improving is as old as sport itself, but the current era of Big Data analytics the NBA finds itself in is transforming that process more quickly and aggressively than anything we have seen before. Players are learning more and more about themselves through video and data visualization, are seeing how things like diet and sleep can impact their performance, and are learning how having healthy joints and role-specific workout plans are lengthening and improving their careers. Teams are internalizing the same lessons, as well as figuring out how to better implement optimal on-court strategies, how to refine their different approaches to player procurement, and about the varying values and success rates of the different team-building components. It’s an absolutely fascinating time to be a basketball fan, as we’re in the early stages of where this all eventually will go, and the marriage of sports and technology brings two of our most popular and competitive worlds together in compelling fashion.

  In the course of reporting and writing this book, I conducted over 125 interviews, watched nineteen of the NBA’s thirty teams play live in eight different NBA arenas, worked as a color analyst on college games, watched elite high school events in multiple states, spent about a million hours watching NBA League Pass, repeatedly got lost in NBA.com’s statistics sections, and dove headfirst into NBA Twitter in order to keep abreast of the latest smart writing going on.

  Even with all of that preparation, the topic was a challenging one, both to report and to present. Basketball analysis and related technology keep evolving at a frantic pace, and as the NBA only has thirty franchises, with a very limited talent pool to draw from, any competitive advantages a franchise can establish are guarded ferociously. Many staf
fers are prohibited from talking about their team’s personnel or anything to do with their internal analyses, and even if a person was allowed to broach the topic of analytics, most teams are so secretive and work in such silos that no one could really speak much about anyone else other than their own team. Third-party vendors are also very careful about identifying their clients, such is the level of secretiveness involved.

  As such, the best way to attack the topic was to frame it within the 2014–15 NBA season and use detailed vignettes and case studies to attempt to explain what was happening. So, you will read about Gregg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs—even though they (politely) refused to participate and wouldn’t even guarantee me practice access in San Antonio. You will also read about the analytics-crazy Rockets and their general manager, Daryl Morey—even though he (through a team spokeswoman) declined to be interviewed. You will get much more inside perspective from other players, coaches, team management, service providers, and media that will piece together a comprehensive view of how analytics are shaping the basketball we watch, and how those who are behind in the technology race are already feeling the competitive hit.

  It was impossible to get everyone, though, and perhaps the most perfect summation of the high level of protectiveness came from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Cuban typically is willing to converse with mostly anyone via e-mail or his Cyber Dust app, and he is an investor in at least two of the major analytics technologies now widely used in the NBA. Under Cuban, Dallas is widely considered to be a leading franchise in terms of both analytical focus and monetary investment, and Cuban himself has been quoted as saying the Mavericks have a huge number of data-related employees. It’s not a secret that the Mavs are doing this, although what exactly they’re doing is more of one.

  His reply to an interview request: “Have to pass but I’ll read it.” Anything to get an edge.