Game changer: New GM Monte McNair will bring Kings deep into basketball analytics
There was a telling moment during the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference March 6-7 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center that might have revealed something about the Kings’ past and more about their future.
Kings vice president of strategy and analytics Luke Bornn participated in a panel discussion entitled “Pass the Secret Sauce: Learning Across Sports.” Bornn had just made a point about using advanced metrics to better measure a player’s shooting ability and even his shot arc when there was a brief exchange that indicated the Kings were behind the times in their use of basketball analytics.
“We have that data, so why aren’t we using it?” Bornn said.
“Who says we aren’t using it?” another panelist asked.
“Well, you guys might be,” Bornn conceded.
One of the other panelists was Monte McNair. At the time McNair was still serving under Daryl Morey as an assistant general manager with the Houston Rockets, but he will be formally introduced as the new general manager of the Kings during a video news conference Wednesday. Meet the new boss. He’s not the same as the old boss.
“We used to get 200 events per game in the play-by-play and now we’re getting thousands of events per second,” McNair said following Bornn’s remarks at the Sloan conference. “The data is just enormous and you simply need the infrastructure. “That’s another one where we’ve learned from other sports who have had more data or even other industries like retail or finance, where they have tons of data, and how do we actually get this in a form that we can pull it out and give it to our analysts?
“Then you’ve got people who have worked with imaging and more spatial areas as opposed to a lot of the regressions that we’ve kind of started with. We had a physics major with us (in Houston) at one point doing some shot arc stuff and things you would never have to do before. So it’s definitely opening it up. … You need people with different skills and it’s great. It’s another place to find an advantage.”
Intro to basketball analytics
Former Kings general manager Vlade Divac has many virtues as a humanitarian and one of the more beloved figures in franchise history, but he didn’t study computer science at Princeton. He never worked as a researcher for STATS LLC and he certainly wasn’t considered a pioneer in the basketball analytics movement.
The Kings have employed people in analytics for years, but under Divac there was little indication the data was utilized like it is in many other organizations. Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé hired renowned analytics expert Dean Oliver in 2014, but Oliver was fired in 2015 amid reports that Divac opposed the use of analytics in player evaluations. In August, The Athletic reported Bornn had stepped back into a consultant role, a decision made prior to Divac’s resignation.
McNair’s introduction as the Kings’ general manager will serve as Sacramento’s introduction to analytics. Analytics Magazine once defined sports analytics as the management of structured historical data, the application of predictive analytic models that utilize that data, and the use of information systems to inform decision makers and enable them to help their organizations in gaining a competitive advantage on the field of play. That would come as a welcome change in Sacramento, where the Kings haven’t enjoyed many competitive advantages while amassing a string of 14 consecutive losing seasons, the longest active playoff drought in the NBA.
The magazine noted that studies applying mathematical models to professional sports data can be traced back more than 50 years. The practice wasn’t popularized until author Michael Lewis documented the 2002 Oakland A’s analytical efforts in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”
The Rockets have led this revolution in the NBA since Morey was named general manager in 2007. One of Morey’s first moves was to hire McNair, who started as a data analyst before being promoted to director of basketball operations in 2013, vice president of basketball operations in 2015 and assistant general manager in 2018.
Over the past 13 years, the Rockets have compiled a 640-400 (.615) record with 10 playoff appearances and two trips to the Western Conference finals. Their offense is designed to generate 3-point attempts and high-percentage shots at the rim, almost to the total exclusion of less-efficient midrange shots.
The Rockets attempted 45.3 3-pointers per game this season, leading the league for the fourth year in a row and the seventh time in eight seasons. According to Basketball Reference, 50.1% of their shots were 3-pointers and 29.7% were taken within 3 feet of the rim. No team in the NBA took a lower percentage of its shots from 3 to 10 feet (12.6%), 10 to 16 feet (4%) and 16 feet to the 3-point line (3.6%).
Applying analytics to Kings
All of this has been done deliberately and by design in Houston. Sacramento might be next.
How will McNair view the Kings’ roster? What will he think of De’Aaron Fox, Buddy Hield, Bogdan Bogdanovic and Marvin Bagley III? Will he want to bring back Kent Bazemore, Nemanja Bjelica, Harry Giles III or Alex Len? The way the organization values each of these players could change dramatically based on McNair’s vision for the team.
Advanced analytics go far beyond traditional box scores and conventional notions of value. During a panel discussion at the Sloan conference in 2016, McNair was asked about the challenges of getting coaches to buy into the use of analytics and if sentiments have changed over the years. McNair’s response might have revealed something about the talks he will have with Kings coach Luke Walton in the weeks and months ahead.
“I think for coaches, obviously, this is pretty new, the analytics movement,” McNair said. “You guys obviously played and it wasn’t a big part of basketball back then, but I think it’s becoming more and more integrated. And I’ve seen with our coaches — we had coach (Kevin) McHale last year and J.B. (Bickerstaff) this year — and I think the initial kind of thrust to try to get them to buy in is tough, but once you get a few wins and they see that what you are doing helps them and works, it just makes it easier to keep going down that path.
“I think the other thing is getting over the initial kind of us versus them mentality, which especially there was when I was upstairs and they’re downstairs, so being around the coaches more, them knowing we’re on the same team, trying to do the same thing, allows them to at least get straight to the merits of what I’m trying to tell them instead of trying to think, ‘Well, does he have some other agenda here he’s trying to push?’”
Panelists were asked if they would change a game plan based on analytics. Mike Brown and Vinny Del Negro, two former head coaches, seemed to dismiss the idea. McNair did not.
“It depends on what it is, but certain things (analytics are) going to be more helpful on, so I don’t think you’re ever going to change your entire scheme or use just that,” McNair said. “It’s a tool. For instance, a guy’s 3-point percentage is probably a little more useful from the analytics perspective, whereas something like how a team does against pick-and-roll coverage, I might be able to point — actually, J.B. and I just had this conversation the other day. I said there’s nothing conclusive here, but here’s where it leads and here’s some video to go watch.”
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 7:03 AM.
