Chapter 53: Digital Age

Adrian Wojnarowski, of Polish origin, graduated from the University of Bristol in Connecticut in 1987 with a major in sports media. After that, he went to Saint Bonaventure University for further studies and worked for some tabloid newspapers. Write sports press releases.
When he was 25 years old, he was hired as a writer by the California Fresno Bee newspaper to be responsible for the basketball section of the Fresno area. In 1997, he began to write sports columns for the New Jersey "Record" magazine. This time he was in charge of the basketball board of the entire New York area.
He works very hard, and in just a few years he has become the gold medal writer of the "Record" magazine, but in the final analysis he is just a writer, just standing on the periphery of the basketball circle using colorful or sharp 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 be a real professional and a real basketball player.
Therefore, the scout team formed by the NBA to establish the development league was a small opportunity for him. He was informed that he decisively used the relationship with the owner of the "record" magazine to practice Adam Silva and entered this Scout team. He can finally influence and intervene in the birth of a minor league as an insider. This is an important step.
In the Starbucks cafe downstairs of the Olympic Building in New York, Wojnarowski met Leon for the first time. That day, as a member of the scout team, they had a meeting at headquarters. Wojnarowski Arrived very early and now order a cup of coffee in the cafe to read a book.
　　 At that time, Leon had been in New York for many days. Michael Carr returned to Boston ahead of schedule. He went to Charlotte to take care of his own funding as the boss, leaving Leon to face the various problems of forming a development alliance.
Wojnarowski quickly noticed Leon when he was sitting in the cafe, because the others were either talking or reading or drinking coffee. There was only one person with long hair and a little scar on his face. Occupy a table alone with chewing gum, spread a large white paper on the table, and then scribble on the white paper.
　　 In the beginning, Wojnarowski, Leon was a painter. There are countless street painters like this in New York. They paint everywhere, only to have a pair of eyes that can discover the value of these paintings and become famous. But he soon discovered that this guy was indeed painting, but he was not painting art, but several strange patterns.
　　 These patterns are rectangular one by one, and then the inside is divided into several pieces regularly, and one of the dividing lines is a long half arc. As a basketball writer Wojnarowski quickly discovered that these rectangles are actually basketball half-court pictures, and that long semi-circular arc is the three-point line.
Wojnarowski also found that without a ruler, Leon’s drawings were quite regular. He drew ten such drawings orderly on a large piece of paper, each of which was about the same size. The name is also written next to each one, and the separation interval inside is marked with a percentage. He also has different slashes to distinguish these separation intervals.
Wojnarowski finally couldn’t restrain his curiosity and sat down across from Leon with his coffee and started talking. Then he knew that Leon was originally working as a scouting agency for the Celtics, and he was drawing this The picture, which Leon calls the "shooting hot zone map", divides the basketball half into 14 areas, and then counts the shooting percentages of Celtics players in each area to evaluate which area a player is in The highest hit rate, the most shots or the lowest hit rate, the least 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 statistics and video editing. It is a very hard work. Wojnarowski can’t think of how Leon would draw such a picture in a cafe. He didn’t. Seeing 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 boring in the cafe, just to kill time by drawing pictures. As for the data and images, everything is in Leon's mind.
　　 From that moment on, Wojnarowski knew that Leon had a brain different from ordinary people. At the same time, the two became good friends because of basketball, and even left each other's phone calls. After knowing that the other party was a member of the scout team, the two soon became good friends who talked about everything.
Wojnarowski is the same as Leon. He didn't love basketball since he was a child. He just became a basketball newsman because of a coincidence. He didn't expect to enter this pit and he would never be able to climb out; In comparison, Leon’s basketball experience is more legendary, but his time in basketball is also shorter. Especially in terms of his understanding of basketball, Wojnarowski can be Leon’s teacher.
Although Leon is extremely smart, he can remember a lot of information at a glance, and he can understand many things as soon as he learns. His mentor Auerbach is a legend in the basketball world. It can be said that Leon is a well-known and decent person, and he is a generation. The characters of the master close the door are all the regular textbooks of Gaowu Jianling, and they are all about the big people. Even the characters like Pitino were humiliated by Leon and eventually lost their jobs.
However, Leon’s real basic contact with this country of basketball. What keeps the spire of the pyramid 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 amateurs. Basketball League. This allows American basketball to have a rich and complete hematopoietic mechanism. A group of brilliant superstars are old, and the next batch of superstars will soon grow up.
Unlike Leon, who was suddenly closed down by Auerbach, Wojnarowski was a sports media major. He started from a sports newspaper in a county in California, and eventually went to New York, the core area of ​​sports and media. His pen has been cultivated in this circle for ten years. The basketball he has been exposed to includes not only the world's highest level of NBA, but also regional self-entertainment middle school leagues, and college leagues full of attractive opportunities. He is truly from the grassroots of basketball. Fucked up.
The two of them came together and became friends. It can be considered a miracle. Wojnarowski admires Leon’s superhuman intuition and talent. He thinks he has seen many smart people, but like Leon is like "rain It’s really the first time I’ve come across a
human
guy, and he’s not autistic like Rain Man; Leon likes Wojnarowski’s passion for work and his cheerful personality. At the same time, Wojnarowski always talks more. He likes to joke. At the same time, he knows a lot of anecdotes in basketball circles and knows many grassroots basketball workers.
So they established a cooperative relationship and started running around for the development of the league. They would call many college coaches and go to watch the game. Slowly, some agents or coaches started to call them and let them go. Watching the players' training, their reputation began to spread in the basketball circle.
Especially Leon, this guy is a data madman, his ability to play with data is getting better and better, his scout 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 match according to the actual situation, which makes his data analysis very convincing.
Although some experienced veteran scouts or coaches are dismissive of this kind of digital game, they have to admit that these data reports of Leon began to attract attention in the young scout circle, and soon because of Voinarovs. Ji’s influence has triggered a trend in the world of writers. Some basketball article authors have begun to try to add high-level data-enhanced discourse to their writing.
　　 Of course, everything is just the beginning. Leon's work still focuses on evaluating new players for the Celtics. After returning to Boston from the Las Vegas trip, Leon finally took two weeks to deal with the Celtics' data for the entire 1999-2000 season. He and Westland Cooperation and completed a data report of 110,000 words.
In the first few games of the new season, the Celtics, who won a good start and victory in the second game, quickly fell into a quagmire of losing streak. The coach urgently needed an effective plan to change the current team’s decline, so Lai Ang's report became the best diagnosis. This detailed report uses data and video analysis to fully present the shortcomings and advantages of the Celtics in the 1999-00 season and the gap between the top teams in the league. O'Brien said after reading this report, " This will be the Celtics' bible this season."
In order to make a change as soon as possible and let the Celtics come out of Pitino’s shadow, O’Brien has already started recruiting. In the position of assistant coach, he invited a 70-year-old defense expert Dick Hart. This famous defensive coach was once an assistant to O'Brien's father-in-law Jack Ramsey, and then he was a good assistant to Chuck Daley from 1983 to 1986. Before being invited by O'Brien to the Celtics, he directed the defense at Larry Bird's Indiana Pacers and helped them advance to the Finals.
Combined with Leon’s data report and the lessons of the previous games, O’Brien began to reform the Celtics, especially their defense in all aspects. The full-court press that Pitino admired in college simply does not work in the NBA. Hart began to redesign the team’s defensive system. From the seventh game against the Washington Wizards, the Celtics’ defense has changed significantly. They beat the Wizards in the game and suppressed the opponent’s score at 90 points. the following.
Everything started to go on track until November 19, when the team’s general manager, Chris Wallace, decided to hire a team’s deputy general manager to deal with the increasing data processing work. He is not an expert in this regard. He needs a guy who is sensitive to numbers and highly educated to help him, so that he will not be marginalized by the Celtics management, which is increasingly focusing on data. After all, Danny Ainge has become the president of the team and the entire Kyle The special people formed the special mechanism of Angie-Wallace-O'Brien's separation of powers and collective decision.
　　 Wallace needs to strengthen his right to speak in the triangular power, so he valued a guy named Darrell Morey who graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (End of the first volume of Scouting Career)
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