I remember a while back, there was a lot of talk about the Spurs using models to predict the kind of players that would fit into their system, what kind of model was it?
Also, could anyone of you point to a couple of articles about this field? Thanks.
What tools does the Spurs use?
Too easy. Surprised this forum hadn't mentioned him yet.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A38111-2003Nov13.html
washingtonpost.com
Young Executives Are Coming of Age
Fresh Faces Molding Teams' Futures
By Greg Sandoval
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page D01
As the 27-year-old director of player personnel for the San Antonio Spurs, Sam Presti knows what he wants -- to be the Warren Buffett of the NBA.
Presti hopes to select basketball players as shrewdly as Buffett -- one of the world's most successful investors -- chooses stocks.
"I'm in a similar business really," Presti said. "I'm in a futures market. Teams are trying to predict the appreciation of an asset at the same time they identify ways to help grow that asset."
Presti at times sounds like an investment banker rather than an executive of an NBA team, and it's no wonder. He is among a small but growing number of whiz kid executives applying modern business practices and technologies to big league sports. The practice of injecting quan ative analysis into the athletic world has gained a foothold in baseball, with young executives of at least five major league teams using it in their player evaluations. But Presti is among the first to take this model and apply it to the NBA.
The fruits of Presti's work will be on the court at MCI Center on Saturday night, when the Spurs play the Wizards. Presti assumed his current position last summer. But in his previous role as the team's special assistant for basketball operations, he was a major factor in assembling a lineup that last season won the NBA championship. This included drafting rising star Tony Parker, a point guard from France, two years ago and endorsing efforts to bring Turkish-born forward Hedo Turkoglu to San Antonio from Sacramento.
In baseball, some of Presti's contemporaries, people such as Theo Epstein, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, and Paul DePodesta, assistant general manager of the Oakland Athletics, have leapfrogged more-experienced executives by impressing owners with their versatility. They unscramble player contracts, skillfully decipher market-cap rules and slash inefficiencies.
"General managers used to do handshake deals and jot the terms down on napkins," said Kevin Towers, general manager of the San Diego Padres. "Nowadays, you have to get out a payroll-summary sheet. You have to understand contractual language, no-trade provisions, escalators, the way bonuses are structured. . . . It's very complicated."
Perhaps the most important attribute the new executives share in this era of skyrocketing player salaries and flat revenue growth is a desire to operate teams more on a corporate model by tightly controlling costs and risk. They crunch traditional statistics -- be it slugging percentages in baseball or free throw percentage in basketball -- looking for new ways to more accurately measure an athlete's skills. The goal is to reduce the risk of making a bad draft pick or paying too much for a free agent.
When their methods work, they manage to put together winning teams of lesser-known, lower-cost players. The Spurs' payroll ranks 20th in the 29-team NBA.
"Owners are tired of losing money," Towers said. "They want people who manage their payroll wisely, put a good product on the field and turn a profit."
DePodesta, 30, of Alexandria, is credited with helping A's General Manager Billy Beane develop Oakland's seemingly limitless pipeline of stars that has propelled the club into the playoffs four consecutive years.
DePodesta is known in business parlance as a "quant." He pours over statistics in his laptop to dig up talented but overlooked free agents or potential draft picks. Beane and DePodesta refuse to assess players solely on the opinions of sage scouts, whom the A's say are statistically wrong as often as they are right. Crunching numbers is just another way to hedge their bets, DePodesta said.
But statistics are just one part of the equation, and teams always need scouts, said DePodesta, who two years ago turned down an offer to become general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Statistics, for example, can't reveal whether a player has trouble getting along with teammates, drinks too much or doesn't like to practice.
"A mutual-fund manager won't pour money into a stock after only reading a financial report," DePodesta said. "If he's smart, he's also going to talk to the company's executives. We want to combine the subjective with the objective. All we're trying to do is take out as much of the guesswork we can."
In addition to their business smarts, Epstein, Presti and DePodesta have wowed coworkers and bosses with their hustle. Epstein, 29, earned his law degree at the University of San Diego at night while working 70 hours a week for the Padres.
Towers, Epstein's former boss, remembered asking him to prepare the complex statistics the team would need for salary arbitration cases. Some major league teams, Towers said, hire law firms to compile data that show what an arbitration-eligible player should earn, a process that can take up to two weeks and incur $50,000 in fees. Epstein plunked the brief down on Towers's desk the next day. "The work he was able to turn out was incredible," Towers said.
Presti is described much the same way in San Antonio.
A former basketball player at Division III Emerson College in Boston, where he was the school's first Rhodes Scholar candidate, Presti once wrote up a contract that legally bound each of his teammates to play hard. After learning of Presti's promotion with the Spurs, one of those teammates, Alex Tse, said, "I don't mean any disrespect to the people who held his job previously, but there's no doubt in my mind that Sam outworked them."
When the Spurs hired Presti as a $250-a-month intern three years ago, Presti immediately immersed himself in the history of the NBA draft. He noted which first-round picks flopped and which late-round picks flourished. He created charts and spreadsheets to unearth patterns and tendencies. Presti refused to disclose exactly what he discovered, citing the compe ive pressures of the NBA, but said the Spurs have since put his findings to use.
Presti said the Spurs are experimenting with new ways to analyze statistics to gauge player performance. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is using similar methods to put together his team, one of the best in the league.
"I told [Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich] within two weeks after we hired Sam, 'Pop, this is a guy we need to keep,' " said Spurs General Manager R.C. Buford, who has promoted Presti in each of his three years with the club.
Presti crisscrosses the United States to scout high school and college players. Gym rats in countries such as Greece, Spain and Serbia and Montenegro recognize him when he swings through to see foreign players. One European scout dubbed him the "NBA's Indiana Jones."
Presti was still in his first year with the Spurs when he pressed the team not to give up on drafting Parker after the French-born guard had a poor pre-draft workout. Presti created a five-minute highlight videotape of Parker that persuaded Popovich to give Parker, then 19, another look, Buford said.
The Spurs chose Parker with the 28th pick of the first round in the 2001 NBA draft. About two weeks into the season, Parker was made a starter. Last season, he averaged 15 points and five assists while helping the Spurs win the championship. Few of the guards drafted before Parker, such as Brandon Armstrong, Kedrick Brown and Joseph Forte, have come close to his impact. Forte is already out of the league.
Presti, whom one NBA executive said is almost certain to be courted by other teams for a front-office job, said he has only begun to apply business management techniques to professional basketball.
"I don't think it makes sense for me to account for my age or how many years I've been in the business," he said. "That's where I think I have an advantage on some who've been around for a while. They are used to doing things a certain way. I go ahead and challenge those concepts."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
um, er, um...well. Otherwise a good article.The fruits of Presti's work will be on the court at MCI Center on Saturday night, when the Spurs play the Wizards.
It's always important to look at the date on the label to ensure freshness.
Hopefully Holt Cat won't scrimp when it comes to paying to keep the kid.
http://www.allthingsbillbelichick.co.../spurspats.htm
Spurs, Patriots Have Formed a Winning Alliance
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philadelphia Enquirer
June 26, 2005
by David Aldridge
SAN ANTONIO, Texas - One of the most interesting of alliances is taking place between two championship organizations, each of which has captured three world championships in a viciously compe ive sport and stands atop its respective league.
Each is run by a no-nonsense coach with a military background who is much more complex than the martinet image he projects.
Each has a second-in-command of understated brilliance, more than happy to stay in the shadows and defer to the public leader while creating an organization with a single voice and philosophy that centers on a "culture" of shared sacrifice.
Each has a superstar as selfless as he is talented who is adored by his teammates, not resented.
The parallels between the San Antonio Spurs and New England Patriots are numerous and striking. And each is intimately aware of it.
Over the last couple of years, the management teams of the Spurs and Patriots have grown close. Though they've never actually met, their top executives - Spurs general manager R.C. Buford and Patriots vice president of player personnel Scott Pioli - are in constant contact with one another via e-mail and telephone, sharing ideas and philosophies about building and maintaining winning franchises.
"I try to read everything I can about them and respect the out of the way they've done things," Buford said of the Pats during the NBA Finals.
The genesis of the relationship is found with a third organization, the Cleveland Indians. That team's general manager, Mark Shapiro, is a close friend of both Pioli - whom he met when Pioli was with Bill Belichick and the Cleveland Browns in the mid-1990s - and Danny Ferry.
Shapiro has known Ferry since the two met as teenagers in the Baltimore area while Ferry's father, Bob Ferry, was the general manager of the Washington Bullets.
When Danny Ferry, now the Spurs' director of basketball operations, played in Cleveland with the Cavaliers, he and Shapiro grew closer.
"There's been a lot of sharing between R.C., Mark Shapiro, myself and [Spurs director of player personnel] Sam Presti," Pioli said in a telephone interview. "We haven't had a chance to get the coaches and managers together, but the rest of us communicate at different points in time. There definitely has been some crossover in philosophical concepts of team building."
"There are definitely transferables in identifying, selecting talent and building a team," Shapiro said by telephone. "But there are very different conditions within collective-bargaining agreements, revenue situations, that definitely influence the carrying out of that... . The exchange is only beneficial."
If there is a template that the organizations each share about building a winning organization, it's this: A player's ultimate contribution to a team has much more to do with his character than his skill set.
"It's what kind of guy he is," Ferry said. "It's not just the guy throws 90 m.p.h. What's his makeup? And how can we build? When I was playing, [seeing] my dad doing it, meeting someone like Mark and being in the Spurs' organization, made me want to be in management."
Said Pioli: "We're not just collecting talent. There's a lot of things that they look for in people in terms of intangibles that are the same things we look for. They look for people who care about winning. A lot of people say they care about winning. Not everyone does."
Both Buford and Pioli share a close, longtime relationship with their respective coaches, Gregg Popovich and Belichick. They know what kind of players will mesh with their coaches and which ones they should stay away from.
Pioli knows that guys who don't love football won't last long with Belichick, who learned the game at the knee of his father, Steve, a 33-year coach at the U.S. Naval Academy. Popovich, the U.S. Air Force graduate, remained patient with Buford while he remade the Spurs' first championship team around Tim Duncan, even as the Spurs lost some heartbreaking playoff series to the Lakers.
"Pop allowed that to happen," Buford said. "Most coaches, they'd say, 'We have to do this now. I need to know what my team's going to be the next three or four years.' He never did that. He accepted the plan and allowed it to take place."
Shapiro went to Detroit during the Finals to see Ferry and the Spurs play their pivotal Game 5 against the Pistons. Pioli was returning from a family outing in Arizona and wasn't able to make it but watched on television. Within minutes of Robert Horry's game-winning and series-turning three-pointer, Pioli had fired off a congratulatory e-mail to Buford.
"My wife couldn't care less about the NBA," Pioli said. "But she sat up and watched Game 5 with me. She got very frustrated when the game went into overtime. But she gets it now."
The Spurs and Patriots are also keenly aware of their good fortune. Duncan should be playing for the Celtics, adding to their collection of championship banners. But for the luck of a Ping-Pong ball, the Spurs could be playing in Vegas right now. And the Patriots certainly didn't know what they were getting when they took Tom Brady with the 199th pick of the 2000 draft.
But they've maximized their teams around those superstars. And they aren't too proud or satisfied not to take advice from another winner.
"We both think we can learn from each other," Buford said.
Too easy. Surprised this forum hadn't mentioned him yet.
I don't think it will come down to money. However, I think that some team will offer him a GM position, and,well, we have one of those already.
Sam's already been promoted (in October) to Asst. GM..FWIW.
thx
HAHAHA! Good one SWC!
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
