The Whip of the God of Basketball

Adrian Wojnarowski, Polish, graduated from the University of Bristol in Connecticut with a major in sports media in 1987, and then went to St. Write sports press releases.

At the age of 25, he was hired by the Fresno Bee, California, as a writer, specializing in the basketball section of the Fresno area. In 1997, he began to write a sports column for the "Record" magazine in New Jersey. This time he is in charge of the basketball sector in the entire New York area.

He worked very hard, and in just a few years he became a gold medal writer of "Record" magazine, but in the end he was just a writer, just standing on the periphery of the basketball circle and using colorful or sharp and profound language To describe this arena, but there is no way to really go deep into it, this is not what he wants, he wants to become a real professional, a real basketball expert.

Therefore, the scout team formed by the NBA to prepare for the establishment of the Development League this time was a small opportunity for him. When he got the news, he decisively practiced with Adam Silva with the help of the owner of "Record" magazine, and entered this world. scouting team. He can finally influence and intervene in the birth of a minor league as a basketball insider, which is an important step.

Wojnarowski met Leon for the first time in the Starbucks cafe downstairs in the Olympic Building in New York. They were going to the headquarters for a meeting as part of the scouting team that day. Wojnarowski Come early, order a cup of coffee and read a book in the cafe.

At that time, Leon had already stayed in New York for many days, and Michael Karl returned to Boston ahead of schedule. He went to Charlotte to work on his own investment as the boss, leaving Leon alone to face various problems in forming the Development League.

Wojnarowski sat in the cafe and quickly noticed Leon, because everyone else was either chatting and reading or concentrating on drinking coffee, except for one guy with long hair and a little scar on his face, chewing Occupying a table alone with chewing gum, spread out a large white paper on the table, and then scribble on the white paper.

In the beginning, Wojnarowski and Leon were painters. There are countless such street painters in New York. They paint everywhere, just hoping to have a pair of discerning eyes to discover the value of these paintings and then become famous. But he soon discovered that this guy was indeed drawing, but it was not an artistic painting, but several strange patterns.

Each of these patterns presents a rectangle, which is then regularly divided into several pieces, one of which is a long semi-arc. As a basketball writer, Wojnarowski quickly discovered that these rectangles were actually basketball half-court diagrams, and that long semi-circular arc was the three-point line.

Wojnarowski also found that without a ruler, Leon drew quite regular pictures. He drew ten such pictures in an orderly manner on a large piece of paper, each of which was about the same size, and then The name is written next to each one, and the intervals inside are marked with percentages. He also has different slashes to distinguish these intervals.

Finally, Wojnarowski couldn't hold back his curiosity and sat across from Leon with coffee and began to chat. Then he knew that Leon was working as a scout for the Celtics, and the picture he was drawing Figure, which Leon called "shooting hot zone map", he divided the basketball half court into 14 areas, and then counted the shooting percentage of Celtics players in each area to evaluate which area a player is in The highest hit rate and the most shots or the lowest hit rate and the fewest shots. This is of great significance to evaluating a player's shooting ability, and it also helps a lot in the tactical arrangement of the team's tactics.

Making such a picture requires a lot of data statistics, as well as video editing, which is a very hard work. Wojnarowski can't figure out how Leon would draw such a picture in a cafe. He didn't See what information Leon is holding in his hand, and this kind of picture does not need to be hand-painted.

Leon said that he was purely bored in the cafe, and was just drawing pictures to kill time. As for those data and images, all of them were in Leon's mind.

From that moment on, Wojnarowski knew that Leon had a brain that was different from ordinary people. At the same time, the two became good friends because of basketball, and even left each other on the phone. And then after knowing that the other party is a member of the scouting team, the two quickly became good friends who talked about everything.

Wojnarowski is a bit like Leon. He didn’t love basketball since he was a child, but he became a basketball newsman because of a coincidence. Leon's basketball experience is more legendary than Leon's, but his time in basketball is also shorter, especially in terms of understanding of the basketball world, Wojnarowski can be Leon's teacher.

Although Leon is extremely smart, he can memorize a lot of information at a glance and understand many things as soon as he learns it. His mentor Auerbach is even a legend in the basketball world. People who are close to the master, all learn the formal textbooks from a high position, and what they have seen is the ups and downs of big people. Even people like Pitino were humiliated by Leon and lost their jobs in the end.

However, Leon's real basic contact with this basketball country, what maintains the pyramid tip piercing the clouds, is the solid foundation of close contact with the earth. For American basketball, it is their perfect elementary school, middle school, college league and various amateur sports Basketball League. This has allowed American basketball to have a rich and complete hematopoietic mechanism. A group of all-powerful superstars have aged, and the next batch of superstars has grown up quickly.

Unlike Leon, who was suddenly accepted by Auerbach as a closed foundation, Wojnarowski was born in sports media, started from a sports newspaper in a county in California, and finally went to the core area of ​​sports and media - New York, using His pen has been working in this circle for ten years. The basketball he has touched includes the world's highest level NBA, the regional middle school student league for self-entertainment, and the college league full of attractive opportunities. He is a true basketball player from the grassroots It came up by crawling and rolling.

It can be regarded as a miracle that the two of them came together and became friends. Wojnarowski admired Leon's superhuman intuition and talent. He thought he had seen many smart people, but Leon was like "Rain It’s really the first time I’ve met him, and he’s not autistic like Rain Man; Leon likes Wojnarowski’s enthusiasm for work and jovial personality. Together, Wojnarowski always talks more. He loves to joke, and at the same time knows a lot of anecdotes and strange things in the basketball circle, and knows many grassroots basketball workers.

So they established a cooperative relationship and began to travel around for the formation of the development league. They would call many college coaches and watch the game. Slowly, some agents or coaches began to call them and let them go. Watching the players practice, their reputation began to spread gradually in the basketball circle.

Especially Leon, this guy is a data maniac, his ability to play with data is getting higher and higher, his scouting report will always have a lot of tables, but his data tools are always not limited to one or several types, Instead, he chooses the matching according to the actual situation, which makes his data analysis very convincing.

Although some experienced and senior scouts or coaches dismissed this kind of numbers game, it has to be admitted that these data reports of Leon began to attract attention in the young scout circle, and soon because of Voinarovs Key's influence sparked a trend among writers, and some basketball writers began experimenting with advanced data-augmentation discourse in their writing.

Of course, everything is just the beginning, and Leon's focus is still on evaluating new players for the Celtics. After returning to Boston after his trip to Las Vegas, Leon finally took two weeks to deal with the data of the Celtics throughout the 1999-2000 season. Cooperation, completed a 110,000-word data report.

In the first few games of the new season, the Celtics, who won a good start and won the second game, quickly fell into the quagmire of losing streak. The new coach urgently needed an effective plan to change the current team's decline, so Le Ang's report became the best medical certificate. This detailed report uses data and video analysis to fully present the Celtics' shortcomings, advantages, and the gap between the top teams in the league in the 99-00 season. After reading the report, O'Brien said, " This will be the bible for the Celtics this season."

In order to make changes as soon as possible and let the Celtics come out of the shadow of Pitino, O'Brien has already started recruiting. In the position of assistant coach, he invited the 70-year-old defensive expert Dick Hart , the famous defensive coach was an assistant to O'Brien's father-in-law, Jack Ramsey, and then from 1983 to 1986 he was a good helper to Chuck Daly. Before being invited to the Celtics by O'Brien, he coached the defense of Larry Bird's Indiana Pacers and helped them advance to the Finals.

Combined with Leon's data report and the lessons learned from the previous games, O'Brien began to transform the Celtics in an all-round way, especially their defense. The full-court press that Pitino advocated in college simply does not work in the NBA. , Hart began to redesign the team's defensive system. Starting from the seventh game against the Washington Wizards, the Celtics' defense has improved significantly. They beat the Wizards in the game and suppressed the opponent's score to 90 points. the following.

Everything started to go right until Nov. 19, when the team's general manager, Chris Wallace, decided to hire a deputy general manager to deal with the increased data crunching. He's no expert at this. He needs a guy who is sensitive to numbers and highly educated to help him, so that he will not be in the Celtics management that is increasingly concerned about statistics. After all, Danny Ainge is now the team. President, the entire Celtics have formed a special mechanism of separation of powers such as Angie-Wallace-O'Brien and collective decision-making.

Wallace needed to strengthen his voice in the power triangle, so he valued a guy named Darrell Morey who graduated from MIT. (The first volume of scouting career is over)