My Path to the NBA
May, 2024
Introduction
In July of 2019, I made the ambitious and stubborn promise to myself that I’d be working in the NBA in 5 years – I was only 16 years old and about to enter my senior year of high school. About 5 years have passed, and I’m set to graduate with a triple-major in Data Science, Statistics, and Economics. I worked for the UChicago Women’s and Men’s Basketball Teams, completed relevant internships in analytics and scouting, and revived the Sports Analytics Group on campus, and next month, I’ll be starting my dream job with the Brooklyn Nets!
“Those times when you get up early and you work hard; those times when you stay up late and you work hard; those times when you don’t feel like working, you’re too tired, you don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway; that is actually the dream.”
Wharton Moneyball Academy
For some background, I grew up playing and watching basketball, which was pretty easy since I lived in San Francisco and got to root for the Golden State Warriors. I had also always loved math and picked up computer programming in high school, and in an elective class, I got my first exposure to the intersection between basketball and math. I analyzed a dataset of every shot Kobe Bryant attempted in his career, and I enjoyed it so much that I ended up continuing the project long after the deadline.
My teacher noticed and told me about the Wharton Moneyball Academy, a 3-week summer program at the University of Pennsylvania that gives students college-level instruction in statistics and computer science applied to sports analytics. I attended the program and loved it, and it was that summer that I decided that I would do whatever it takes to land a job in the NBA.
COVID-19
Throughout my next (and last) year of high school, especially since this was the year the pandemic sent us all home, I began exploring my passion through side projects, which helped me develop and apply my technical skills. At the same time, I slowly started networking in the basketball analytics world, and one of the most common pieces of advice I received was to start a blog or personal website to publicly house all of my projects. I ended up building this website, which I still update frequently.
Pro Insight
I was fortunate enough to connect with Prospective Insight, a team of basketball analysts across all levels – middle school through the NBA. They brought me in as a Data Analyst Intern, but over time, I’ve helped out with various other tasks. For example, when Pro Insight hosted a Combine for middle and high school hoopers in Chicago, I worked with BAM Testing to record athletes’ measurements (see left). This was also an incredible non-analytics learning opportunity for me since I got to learn and interact with elite scouts and talent evaluators with such a wide range of experiences, and the Pro Insight team has truly given me unmatched mentorship over the past few years.
Intramural Sports
My four years started at UChicago in the Fall of 2020, but it wasn’t until the following year that campus started opening up again. I got super involved with intramural sports both as a player and a referee, and my friends and I even won a Residence League Basketball Championship (see right). My involvement with intramurals – and the fact that I didn’t have any summer employment prospects – led me to apply for a Camp Counselor position at the sports camp hosted by UChicago and led by the Director of Intramural Sports. At the summer camp, I met three of the coaches from the UChicago Women’s & Men’s Basketball Teams and eventually formed a working relationship with them that culminated in a Student Manager/Analytics Intern position the following season.
UChicago Womens & Men's Basketball
Since UChicago competes at the Division III level, we don’t exactly have a precedent of Analytics Interns – let alone Student Managers – which essentially gave me the flexibility to learn a little bit of everything from basic event management to coaching and basketball strategy as well as the freedom to explore whatever I wanted from a statistical perspective.
My direct basketball responsibilities started as attending all practices and home games and quickly expanded to writing supplementary scouting and postgame reports, playing on the scout team, and tracking live stats in practices.
Learning to track practice stats was an incredibly non-linear and iterative process. We had never manually tracked any stats at this scale, so there was no blueprint for where to start or how to execute it. What began as drawing shot maps on a piece of paper quickly evolved to inputting data on a Google Sheet, and the final iteration was a complete and comprehensive web application that I built entirely from scratch. My app, which I called SlowScout (for reasons I’ll explain later), scaled the way we track stats, is operable on any device, and runs drastically more efficiently than past iterations. I incorporated user feedback from the coaches, players, and other managers, and our ability to easily record and analyze practice data unlocked an entirely new landscape of player development and evaluation.
Sports Analytics Group
At the same time that I was running analytics for UChicago Basketball, I stayed busy attempting to revive the Sports Analytics Group, a student organization that had gone largely inactive due to COVID-19. I wanted to turn the club into a space where students can share research, discuss sports from analytical perspectives, hear from industry professionals, and learn new technical skills as well as apply them to sports. In short, I did exactly that.
Under my leadership, we hosted speakers across 4 major sports, including 12 professional teams and sports organizations, led introductory-to-advanced level technical workshops, and participated in 6 competitions. I led the winning team at the 2023 Milwaukee Bucks Basketball Analytics Hackathon, with the prize being recognition at a Bucks home game the following season – we got to see Giannis drop 64 points (see right)! We also sent students to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which was a huge networking boost in the two years that I attended.
FastModel Sports
Through my network, I was able to secure an internship in Product Management with FastModel Sports for the summer before my final year of undergrad. FastModel is a leading basketball analytics provider, and UChicago Basketball is one of their clients, which meant that I was a frequent user of their app, FastScout. My work that summer directly inspired me to build SlowScout, which supplemented FastScout’s analytics in addition to tracking practice stats. The company is based in Chicago, so I got to stay in town for the summer and attend a ton of Sky games (see left)!
Brooklyn Nets
Having established my core commitments between the UChicago Basketball Teams and the Sports Analytics Group, my last year of undergrad was primarily filled with a lot of the same – continuing to develop my basketball skillset and expand my network. Without going into the details, this spring I received an offer to join the Brooklyn Nets organization, where I’ll be working right after graduation!