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A 55-year-old Texas man who told police he was in "an imaginary relationship" with WNBA star Caitlin Clark was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Monday after pleading guilty to stalking and harassing the Indiana Fever guard. Michael Lewis, of Denton, Texas, reached a deal with Marion County prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to one felony count of stalking and one misdemeanor count of harassment. He will get credit for time served at the Marion County Adult Detention Center since his arrest.
Moreover, almost no former NBA players are currently employed by NBA team analytics departments. One of the very few, it should come as no surprise, is Shane Battier, Miami’s vice president of basketball development and analytics, who played for Morey in Houston from 2006-10 — and was the subject of a Michael Lewis (of “Moneyball” fame) profile in the New York Times in 2009 extolling the Rockets’ Way. (Lewis wound up writing a book about Morey as well, so, one guesses he was a fan.) The reason it matters is this: NBA teams, rather consistently over the last decade, have chosen the next generation of team executives from video rooms and/or their own or other teams’ front offices. And analytics people now dominate those front offices. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that less than a third of NBA teams are run by Black or minority executives:
In Michael Lewis’ book “The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds” Houston GM Daryl Morey acknowledged that stereotypes against Asians played a role in Lin going undrafted in 2010. “He’s incredibly athletic,” Morey said in the book. “But the reality is that everyperson, including me, thought he was unathletic. And I can’t think of any reason for it other than he was Asian.”
Ethan Sherwood Strauss: Steph Curry on what Michael Lewis told the team: "He talked about his process of writing a book and how he takes criticism from his editors, when he's obviously a well known author and has written countless books and articles and whatever. But he always needed somebody to tell him when something was bad. He said the more he became successful, the less people wanted to tell him that. So he really cherished the couple voices he had around him that would keep it straight with him, no matter how big his name got, no matter how many awards he won, no matter how many best sellers he had. He had one editor in particular, but always a couple voices he can rely on to shoot him straight, which is great advice for anybody in our profession."
The 10th anniversary of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is coming up. So we’re having a big party? Morey: Everyone should join. We’re going to have some pretty cool stuff. We’re going to have the original "Moneyball" crew -- Billy Beane, Michael Lewis and Bill James will be there. We’ll have two commissioners at least, might have more. We’ll have (NBA) commissioner (Adam) Silver, (NHL) commissioner (Gary) Bettman. Lots of great owners, coaches, GMs -- pretty excited.
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But what might come as a surprise is how significant that explosion has been, and how far its blast radius might soon reach. The literary specter haunting sports' burgeoning Information Age is no longer Michael Lewis and Moneyball but George Orwell and 1984. The boom officially began during work hours. Before last season, all 30 arenas installed sets of six military-grade cameras, built by a firm called SportVU, to record the x- and y-coordinates of every person on the court at a rate of 25 times a second -- a technology originally developed for missile defense in Israel. This past spring, SportVU partnered with Catapult, an Australian company that produces wearable GPS trackers that can gauge fatigue levels during physical activity. Catapult counts a baker's dozen of NBA clients, including the exhaustion-conscious Spurs, and claims Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as both a customer and investor. To front offices, the upside of such devices is rather obvious: Players, like Formula One cars, are luxury machines that perform best if vigilantly monitored, regulated and rested.
In February 2009, Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame) wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine about Houston’s Shane Battier being the preeminent Kobe-stopper. Bryant told Grover he needed to counter this for an upcoming game against Battier—and he wanted that Sweetchuck guy’s help. Procopio discovered the issue wasn’t Battier, but Bryant. See, Battier funneled Bryant toward Rockets star Yao Ming, daring Bryant to shoot over the 7-foot-6 center. He fell for it way too often. Telling Bryant he was taking too many shots, and a lot of dumb ones, was tough, but Procopio did it.
There were an estimated 2,700 attendees this year, a mix of students (really low QualGrip with that crowd), writers, employees of start-up companies whose names are all various puns on the word "analytics," front-office bigwigs and lil'wigs, accented academics, and — according to the official attendance list that everyone loves to pore over on the first morning to see whom they want to mildly stalk — one Reggie Love.1 It's a funny environment. Mark Cuban stalks the halls trying out video games, trailed by aspirational geeks like a pasty Pied Piper. Michael Lewis, hosting the keynote discussion "Revenge of the Nerds," looks over at America's most adored prophet, Nate Silver, and casually remarks that he can't remember whether he interviewed him for Moneyball. (I wish my own memory lapses were as highbrow as that.) There are basketball-shooting robots in one room, and guys giving talks about tracking the eye movements of soccer players in the next. One night, while out to drinks with a few colleagues and others, I turned to one of those others and was about to politely inquire "So, what do you do?" Before I could, a bunch of the other guys at the table started peppering him with questions about the San Antonio Spurs. As it turns out, he was R.C. Buford, the team's GM. Nice guy!
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