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McDonough wasn’t alone in his admiration. Wallace was a fan, as was Ainge, but McDonough remained solidly in Rondo’s corner even as he struggled through a disappointing sophomore season, rating him the second-best prospect in the draft. "While the rest of the world sort of dropped on Rondo, Ryan continued to evaluate him even higher," says Ainge. "Ryan was pushing very, very hard for Rajon. Ryan was very big in us having that strong of a desire for Rajon." SB Nation

Boston Celtics, Rajon Rondo, Statistics, Ryan McDonough 

"Let’s be honest," says Procopio, "out of 30 GMs in the league, probably 22 of them aren’t going to go to guys who are a step up from interns. That’s what we were -- low-level guys -- and ask them what they think about players. That’s OK. That’s how you run your ship. You’ve got your scouts, you’ve got your assistant general managers. You don’t need a million opinions in the room. Danny was different." Ainge is different. Described as a maverick even by those who work for him, Ainge has little use for titles or hierarchy. What he’s after is information and he doesn’t care where it comes from. "The best thing that happened to my career is working with Danny because he’s so open," says McDonough. "He’ll go to interns and say, ‘So what do you think?’" SB Nation

Boston Celtics, Statistics, Ryan McDonough 

Those conversations with Ainge helped McDonough develop his chops and in 2004 he asked to go on the road and scout local college games. Ainge agreed and sent him out with a bit of advice. "I told Ryan at that time there’s no substitute for work," says Ainge. "All the genius in the world, I don’t care who you are. If it’s a Red Auerbach, a Jerry West, it doesn’t matter. You can’t replace work." SB Nation

Boston Celtics, Statistics, Ryan McDonough 

The Celtics are constantly evaluating names for their summer league team and an annual minicamp they hold in May when international and D-League seasons are over. One of the players in their camp was former lottery pick Terrence Williams, who was playing in China. The Celtics signed him in late February. "If a guy is talented enough to be in the NBA, you have to constantly monitor him until he retires," says McDonough. "I’ve heard people say, ‘I don’t want that guy, or he’s not my kind of guy.’ Well, it’s difficult to dismiss somebody with NBA-caliber ability." SB Nation

Boston Celtics, Statistics, Ryan McDonough 

Bradford Doolittle of ESPN Insider unveiled a new metric for evaluating athleticism at the player and team levels on Wednesday, and that metric revealed that the Orlando Magic are the league's least athletic team overall. The metric, called ATH, "compares each player's percentage in rebounding, foul-drawing, blocked shots and steals to the league norms for a player of his height," Doolittle says. "The ratios are regressed for playing time and averaged together to create ATH, which is expressed as a number extended to three decimal points." An ATH rating of 1.000 indicates league-average athleticism, while a rating of 1.100 would indicate that the player or team in question is 10 percent more athletic than average. Orlandoinstripedpost.com

Orlando Magic, Statistics 

The Magic's overall ATH score is 0.913, which is comfortably behind the New Orleans Hornets' mark of 0.926 for last in the league. Orlando's most athletic players are rookie forward Maurice Harkless, second-year forward Tobias Harris, and veteran big man Glen Davis. Entering Wednesday's games, Harkless ranked as the league's 120th most athletic player. No other team in the league had its most athletic player ranked so low overall; the Philadelphia 76ers, with gadget forward Thaddeus Young (85th in the league), came closest to matching the Magic in this respect. Orlandoinstripedpost.com

New Orleans Hornets, Orlando Magic, Philadelphia 76ers, Glen Davis, Thaddeus Young, Tobias Harris, Statistics 

Fifteen NBA teams have purchased the cameras, which cost about $100,000 per year, from STATS LLC; turning those X-Y coordinates into useful data is the main challenge those teams face.1 Some teams are just starting with the cameras, while others that bought them right away are far ahead and asking very interesting questions. Those 15 teams have been very secretive in revealing how they've used the data, but one team that has made serious progress — the Toronto Raptors — opened up the black box in a series of meetings this month with Grantland. The future of the NBA, at least in one place, looks like this: Grantland

Toronto Raptors, Statistics 

The team could use that expected value system to build an "ideal" NBA defense irrespective of the Toronto scheme, but doing so today would be pointless, since part of the team's job is to sell a sometimes skeptical coaching staff on the value of all these new numbers and computer programs, says Alex Rucker, the Raptors' director of analytics. "You need that coaching perspective," Rucker says. "But we are still looking for where the rules are wrong — areas where there are systemic things that are wrong with what we do on the court. But any system needs to comply with what the coaches want, and what the players can do." Grantland

Toronto Raptors, Statistics, Alex Rucker 

Dwane Casey, Toronto's head coach: "It's a good backup for what your eyes see." Casey added, "It may also shed light on something else," a sentiment both Nori and Sterner echoed at points. "But you can't make all your decisions based on it, and it can't measure heart, and chemistry, and personality." Sterner: "It helps reinforce your gut. Most of the time, your gut is pretty much right." Nori: "More than anything, it's a tool to help confirm what your eyes see." Grantland

Toronto Raptors, Dwane Casey, Statistics 

Christopher A. Vito: #Sixers honoring legendary stat man Harvey Pollack in media workroom for his 91st birthday. Twitter @ChrisVito

Philadelphia 76ers, Harvey Pollack, Statistics 

Tom Moore: #Sixers have cupcake cakes and brief ceremony in press room in honor of Harvey Pollack's 91st birthday. #76ers Twitter @tmoorepburbs

Philadelphia 76ers, Harvey Pollack, Statistics 

Moving his offensive game closer to the basket has enabled Amar'e Stoudemire to reclaim his standing as one of the NBA's most efficient scorers. The Knicks forward is averaging a sterling 1.57 points per shot this year entering Wednesday's action, according to Basketball-Reference.com. That is fourth-most in the league among players scoring at least 15 points per 36 minutes of court time. And it is a huge improvement over his first two seasons as a Knick, when he averaged 1.31 points per shot. Stoudemire's efficiency even approaches his career-best 1.64 for the 2007-08 Phoenix Suns. Wall Street Journal

New York Knicks, Amare Stoudemire, Statistics 

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! Grantland

Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, Statistics 

That last part is what's key. By and large, the discussions at this year's SSAC routinely came back to the importance of communication, collaboration, and context. The stereotype of the fuddy-duddy GM being harassed and condescended to by a nerd with a spreadsheet is crumbling somewhat. Front-office types are incorporating such analyses into their operations, and at the same time the stats crowd has broadened: In the past year I've come across more researchers and writers who use advanced metrics or optical data in conjunction with more "traditional" methods, like narrative writing and video clips. (The new wave of visual data, I think, will only push this further.) Grantland

Statistics 

The Los Angeles Lakers might have been the only NBA team without a representative at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston over the weekend, but general manager Mitch Kupchak says that will change in the future. "We have our reasons (we did not attend) that we'll keep internal," Kupchak told ESPNLosAngeles.com before the Lakers played the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday. "We'll get some feedback and send someone next year." Kupchak said that the Lakers have never sent a representative from the basketball operations side in the six years the event has been presented. Jeanie Buss, Lakers executive vice president of business operations, was a speaker at the conference last year, however. ESPN.com

Los Angeles Lakers, Mitch Kupchak, Jeanie Buss, Statistics 

It's nice to be back at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. This year's model is the seventh edition of a conference that began in 2006 as a small gathering of likeminded folks eager to share cutting-edge analysis that would sharpen their understanding of sports, and has since exploded into a major annual industry event. Sloan 2013 boasts more than 2,700 paid attendees, representatives from more than 90 pro teams across six different sports (including 29 of 30 NBA teams; the Los Angeles Lakers, alone, appear to be unrepresented), a slew of big-name panelists and big-money sponsorship from the likes of Under Armour, StubHub and primary underwriter ESPN, spread throughout the sprawling Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Yahoo! Sports

Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, Statistics 

SportVU positions six special video cameras above the basketball court at different angles to capture, record and store tons of in-game information — player movement, referee movement, ball movement; where, how and how fast players are running; where, how and how fast passes are thrown; etc. Recording all that movement in high definition at 25 frames per second, every second, for an entire game makes for an awful lot of data points — 1 million individual records per game, in fact, according to STATS' Brian Kopp. That leaves the 15 teams that have purchased the cameras looking for an analytical edge — the New York Knicks, Toronto Raptors, Washington Wizards, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics, Milwaukee Bucks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Minnesota Timberwolves, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, Orlando Magic, Dallas Mavericks and Cleveland Cavaliers — holding onto more information than they know what to do with. Yahoo! Sports

Statistics 

"We need better people not at doing the stats, necessarily, but at communicating the stats — at building the bridges," said Kirk Goldsberry, who co-wrote a paper with behavioral analyst Eric Weiss that uses the SportVU data to examine interior defense, long one of the under-explored elements in analytical work, during a late Friday panel. Yahoo! Sports

Statistics, Kirk Goldsberry 

Hollinger described the technology as a potential game-changer in the analytics arms race. Still, such a crushing amount of data is useless without sophisticated analytic techniques, he said, which makes him wary of its immediate utility. “It’s such a revolution that it presents its own challenges,” he said. “The biggest issue is the tsunami of data that they are going to unleash. There’s a lot of great information in there, somewhere, but the ability to process it — that’s the challenge.” New York Times

Memphis Grizzlies, Statistics, John Hollinger 

But there's a lot more to the numbers than the who and the what. They're about how James consistently finds ways to dominate and why Lopez has thrived and Williams has struggled. STATS LLC's SportVU tracking cameras, which record every on-court movement in three dimensions, aren't here to simply tell us that the Heat have the league's most lethal weapon. They're here to tell us how that weapon takes over almost every time it takes the court. As the league takes a breather and prepares for its 62nd annual All-Star game this weekend, now is as good a time as any to take a look back. The Heat are not one of the 15 NBA teams that subscribe to the system, but with half the league on board, SportVU has tracked James for 10 games as of Feb. 14. It's a small sample to go off - just 20 percent of Miami's games - but James has scored 1.14 points every time he drives to the basket, tied for the most in the league. As a team, the Heat average 1.64 points when the reigning MVP takes the ball toward the hole - the fourth-best individual-to-team success rate in the NBA. NBA.com

Miami Heat, Brooklyn Nets, Deron Williams, Statistics