#6: How Stephen Curry & Analytics Broke the NBA — and What Comes Next
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The thing that separates great players from good players are men. It's the same. And Michael had it, and Kobe had it, and Dirk had it, and Manu Ginoli had it. And that is just an insane competitive spirit. And some guys have it, and some guys don't. And I think that's true in business too. Is the people who end up being all-stars are one thing. The people who end up being finals MVPs and multiple world champions...

are insanely driven human beings. Welcome to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark on the world where each week I'm interviewing the best minds in business and tech, sports and entertainment to learn how they've made their mark. Go to divot.org to see all the episodes and get involved. You can also watch us on X or Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts.

- Give it. - This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud and Notion. - Today we're in Austin, Texas. It's kind of freezing. Luckily we'll be doing the interview inside. Our guest is Kirk Goldsberry, one of the most insightful minds in the world of basketball analytics. He's a New York Times bestselling author of "Sprawl Ball." He's also the author of "Hoops Atlas," which maps the transformation of the modern NBA.

He's currently a professor and the executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at the University of Texas. Whether you're a stats geek or a basketball fan, or you're just interested in learning about how data is changing the industry, I think you'll enjoy the conversation with Kirk. He's held positions for the San Antonio Spurs, for ESPN, for Grantland, the Ringer, USA Basketball. He's a visiting researcher at the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences.

Kurt, more importantly, has transformed the way we understand and visualize the game of basketball. He's got a PhD in, of all things, geography. He brings a unique perspective to the court. He's mapped player movements, shot efficiencies that reveal hidden layers of the game that have never been seen before. Today, we're going to talk about his groundbreaking research, his work on spatial analytics, and hear his thoughts on the future of sports data in the NBA. Hope you enjoy it.

Tell us about where we are. What is this beautiful space? We are in Rowling Hall at the University of Texas at Austin. And this is a building that is largely for business school, mostly the masters of business students. And here we're starting the Business of Sports Institute. And it's been my dream to really bridge my

my expertise in sports and sports business with higher education because I got a PhD a long time ago and thought I was going to be a professor my whole career and not take a turn. But here I am back. And I think there's a place to blend sort of business school with sports business education. We're trying to do that here. Are your applications for it through the roof or do people now come to school here in Austin to use this program? Is it still early? How does it work?

Yeah, I mean, we're very popular, which, you know, sports is a great concept. People love sports. So we start on third base. We have topic, right? Yeah.

We can't take a lot of credit, but we have a really unique partnership with the president of the university and the athletic director. And we started a minor in sports and sports analytics that's become very popular. And the goal is to eventually have a major that will help young people find careers in sports. How do people get into sports? Like, how does it happen? Well, my story, like a lot of people who got into sports, is very bizarre and crooked.

And we're trying to straighten that line out, at least for some people. Yeah, it might always be a little unusual to find a career in sports, but we think that a great business education and great internships...

and great topics in the classroom can really help people prepare. And that and blending relationships with people in pro sports and the leagues and doing case studies on certain topics like NBA ratings is what we're looking at this semester. We think there is a way to straighten that line through higher education. So you studied...

mapping and geography. Yeah. And you're in sports. Yeah. Tell us how that happened. Yeah. So I love maps and I love data visualization. Anybody who's familiar with my work can see that there's a lot of statistical graphics and that's the key bridge, statistics. And so spatial statistics, I always say whenever there's an X, Y coordinate,

I'm useful. And a funny thing happened around 2010 in basketball is the XY coordinates became very relevant to analyzing NBA performances. And therefore people needed geography, spatial reasoning, data visualization, and spatial statistics to really understand sports stats. And that was really sort of a platform for me as an analyst. Did you just like wake up in the middle of the night and have this insight?

It's funny you say that. My story really begins on the playground and I was working on post moves, which is how we used to play basketball 30 years ago. This is in high school? In high school. And I noticed in my own game that I was a lot more effective shooting off the left block than the right block, which is not unusual.

But it's something that basketball players notice about their own games and people they're playing against. But as I grew older and analytics started to take over and Michael Lewis puts out Moneyball in 2003, I was wondering why aren't these spatial concepts of shooting filtering into the NBA? Why don't I know where Dirk Nowitzki or Kobe Bryant are?

shoot from and how well they shoot from those places. So that spatial element of performance was missing. And I was teaching at Harvard and I started to look at

finally had time to look at these data. And that's when my career changed. I wrote a paper that presented at MIT about sort of the geography of shooting and looking at Kobe and Steve Nash and all these players and where they shot and how well they shot from those players. I've watched it. It was in 2012. And it's really interesting because it wasn't that long ago. And just seeing it, it's almost like you kind of

Opened this door to something that people kind of knew but they didn't really know. Yeah, and I wonder did and before the data Was sort of laid out in front of people did did NBA players? Did they just sort of instinctively know like I'm good in these spots or Was it yeah, was it just like feel and gut or were people using data? you know pre 2012 or 2010 to

to figure out exactly where they needed to go? That's a great question. It's a little of both. But the bottom line is there was not enough data. There were not enough analytics in those kinds of evaluations. Even players themselves now have a real strong relationship with these kinds of spatial concepts. I'm really good in the corners. I'm really good at the top of the key. I'm really good in the paint.

Those concepts are inherent and have been for a long time. There's a great video that I recommend of Bernard King long before computation talking about how he had 30 favorite places on the course to get his shots. And his whole offensive game was to try to find

a way to get to one of his 30 shots. And I love that because it proves that basketball is a spatial sport long before computation. And again, when I was a kid on the playground noticing these sort of asymmetric tendencies in my own game, it wasn't a computational thing. Yeah. It was just an intellectual thing. And I knew it was, there was this interaction between space and performance that I wanted to really tease out. It's, it's a totally different way to look at sports. And, uh, my, uh,

kids have been golfing a lot and I'm not a great golfer, but I've been playing golfing with them a lot. And what I've learned is I studied it more and played it more is like, it's really, sports is way more fun if you can figure out where you're, you're great. And if you play to those spots, and I think business is the same way. It's, it's like there's things where you really excel and there's places you over index and you should play to your strengths and your, your data, uh,

It really seemed to turn this whole new page on this sport that's changed the world. But it's remarkable that you don't just play anywhere on the court if you want to be great. It seems like the greatest players kind of recognize that at some point and they start really...

picking their shots essentially well i know you're a warriors fan and you know one of the great geographers in basketball history is stephen curry who who not only recognized that the three-point shot was underused but demonstrated that underused to great effect as he led one of the more definitive dynasties in pro basketball history but the science of where is really what i'm obsessed with yeah and for whatever reason

In pro basketball and in college basketball, for that matter, there was a misalignment between where people were trying to score the ball versus where they should have been trying to score the ball. And Stephen Curry is going to go down in history for a variety of reasons.

But he aligned those two things on the court way more than a nerdy analyst like me ever could. But he changed the sport by changing its geography. Did he recognize that or was it sort of instinctual? Did somebody...

tell him? Did he? Well, it was the perfect storm. Yeah. I mean, he's a hyper-talented point guard by any, for any era. But his dad was Del Curry, one of the greatest shooters of his era. And I think having a parent who was so gifted and

And probably Dell probably, and I'm putting words into Dell's mouth, but a lot of the shooters from that era, that prehistoric, pre-career era, probably felt underused because they're sitting here. Hey guys, every time I shoot the ball, it goes in 40% of the time. That's worth 1.2 points. Meanwhile, our whole offense is designed to get these

mid-range shots that are much less effective than that. So I think starting with a parent like Dale got him started down the path. It's definitely an advantage. Yeah, of being one of the more iconoclastic players in basketball history. How did the three-point line come into the NBA in 1979? Well, it was because, you know, it has a sort of a startup-y

Backstory. Yeah. And there's news this January about another rival league starting, I think, emerging from Maverick, Carter, and these other investors. Well, there was another rival league in the 60s and 70s in pro basketball called the ABA. A few years after the NBA started, the ABA came along, and they did two things that really tried to get attention. One, they made a red, white, and blue basketball that's legendary. And two, they painted a three-point line

on the court. So the NBA never had it. The ABA had it. And the ABA got pretty popular with players like Dr. J.

And what happened was they forced a merger, much like, again, in business, live golf and the PGA. A rival league emerges, and then they eventually merge because the rival league becomes a threat. And after that merger, the ABA sort of showed that the three-point shot was interesting and fans liked it. And the NBA, a much more conservative league, ended up adopting it in 1979. What, I mean, was it...

in the sort of business sense like what problem was it trying to solve back then and

Next is going to be, does it still solve the same problem? But do you know like what? Yeah, I think the game, I always describe old school hoops as like clowns in a taxi cab. It was just like a bunch of dudes crushed in the paint. Smashing each other. And if you look at the series of rule changes, because the NBA is many things, and one of them is a sequential list of rule changes. Many of them were designed to open the game up. They widened the lane. But

Post play was kind of boring and kind of redundant. And the three point line was a massive incentive to try to shoot from further away, to try to generate a second offensive center away from the basketball hoop. And it worked, but it worked very slowly.

year over year became a little more popular until we are in 2025. Was it initially received positively? Like did the fans want it? Did the players want it? Or was it kind of like, hey, we got to do this merger thing?

Yeah, I think it was received positively, but it was sort of a gimmick. Yeah. And nobody knew how to shoot that far away. I remember talking to Dennis Scott, who is a great three-point shooter in the NBA. And he talked about it. He said, Kirk, there was no three-point lines on the courts I grew up playing on. I said, why would you even shoot from out there then? He's like, because I could. But why would you shoot from out there? So one of the reasons it took so long for three-point revolution to really happen

is nobody could shoot from 25 feet because there was no reason to teach that skill. I mean, Pete Maravich, there was some occasional exceptions to that rule.

But it took Michael Jordan won national championship and a gold medal on court without a three point line people forget that like in 84 and he was an incredible jump shooter You know by the end of his career all Michael couldn't shoot threes that well, well, no kidding grew up with courts without it Why would he learn to have dude? So I think it took a while because coaches and players had no idea how to use it when it just showed up and Shooting from that far away. It was very difficult for those people was it?

Was it when it started to change, was it driven by the players? Was it driven by the teams?

You know, I think players first, and I only say that because they're younger. So the coaches were the old guys that had grown up without it entirely. And so young players who started to grow up with the three-point line in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, and European players started to develop shooting for big men positions. So famously Dirk Nowitzki, but before him, even other players.

It was the younger players that forced the hand of sort of grumpy coaches to finally let them shoot from 25, 30 feet. And so the... I mean, the NBA has changed rules throughout the course of the league. In fact, one thing in reading...

your book, I had never seen this, I'd never heard of it, but you show that the original key on the chorus actually looked like a key. It makes so much sense. And then they changed it to space the floor a little bit. And then you have FIBA that did the

I don't know what the trapezoid thing for a long time. That's what I grew up playing in Europe. And so there's, there's precedent for changing rules, which is going to lead to, maybe there should be some other changes, but, um, it it's, I mean, it took, it seems like it took decades and then really like at some point, like there's like an inflection point. Yeah. It was like a moment. What was that moment where things really started to change for the three point shot? Yeah.

You got to point to Steph and you got to point to James Harden and the Rockets teams in the middle of last decade. The Rockets won their, or I'm sorry, the Warriors won their first championship in 2015. It's a convenient place, I think, to really put a flag in the ground of NBA history and say that's when it changed. There were definitely teams that were more aggressive with a three-point shot before that. But I think we'd all agree with 10 years of hindsight that Stephen Curry was

changed it with those four championships. There was a term, and I bet you all remember this, Charles Barkley would commonly say jump shooting team can't win the NBA championship. Nobody says that anymore. Stephen Curry with Steve Kerr's motion offense changed that forever. Nobody says that anymore. Jump shooting teams can win the title and do win the title. In fact, the Celtics are now one of the most, if not the most aggressive three-point shooting team in the world. And guess what? They're the defending champs now.

if I'm shooting a three pointer, obviously it's worth three points, but it's so much further from the basket. Like what, what are statistically like what's each three shot worth versus, you know, eight or nine foot shot or a layup or, you know, something like that. Yeah. One of the main revelations I had early in my project was, um,

Sort of a shocking revelation to me is that if you map out all the shots in the NBA, every season about 200,000 shots are taken. And away from like four or five feet from the basket, so starting at about six feet from the basket, shots go in around 40% of the time, no matter what.

And once you get to 25 feet, that figure has only decayed to 33, 34, 35%. So the league really, with the exception of the tiny area around the basketball hoop, is a 33 to 40%.

shooting environment. Now, when you make some of those shots were three points and some of them were two points, the dominant trend of analytics and basketball starts to manifest. Once that realization is had, why would I ever take a two point jump shot? Your math doesn't make any sense. And that really has driven the pace and space era of the last 10 years. The other thing I learned from you is that

Which, yeah, it's so counterintuitive, but because of the spatial part of it, that the eight or nine foot shot, you've got somebody right up against you. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you're closer, but it's, you, you got to, you know, eight foot.

you know, ladder with the arms and everything standing in front of you. You have Wictor Wimbanyama or Rudy Gobert or Joel Embiid, these men who are designed to make that shot very difficult. Yeah. The only reason you shoot a four foot shot is because you can't shoot a one foot shot is what I always say. And you can't shoot it because there's probably a giant human being who doesn't want you to shoot it. Oh, and that makes the numbers really difficult.

But yeah, it's easier to create open looks further away for the basket with ball and player movement as well. And Ray Allen had set the single season three point record at like 269. Steph comes in at 400 that year you talk about. And it like,

What is, we know as fans what that did and what we thought about it and the arenas filled with people to see that show. What did the NBA, what did the players, what did the executives, what were they saying as they're seeing this?

I mean, I think Stefan deserves so much credit for many things, but blending people underestimate how fit he is and how incredible his dribbling skills are. And what he was really able to do was not just be the best shooter in the world, but merge his world-class ball handling skills with his world-class shooting. So he created for the first time hundreds of his own three-point shots.

So before Curry, about 95% of threes in the NBA were assisted. In other words, they were catch and shoot three point tries. Somebody passed me the ball and I shot the ball. Stefan changed everything because he dribbled into his own shots. He would break down his defender's balance and step back into his own self-created shooting space and knock that down. That is his signature move. And that is

People are still trying to replicate that. He's still the best in the world at that exact thing. But creating your own shots, dribbling in a fast break, stopping and shooting a three was frowned upon. He changed that. So he really...

Ushered in a new acceptance and a new understanding of how potent Creating your own shots could be at any point in the shot clock from three-point range So he he he created he sort of took something that worked He he shot way more breeze then he starts shooting way more and we've now seen this kind of balloon but yeah, they the Warriors start shooting more threes than any other team with clay and with him and

And then he also basically innovated on it by creating something new with his own shot. Yeah. And I think there was people like me and others who would see. You were at the Spurs at the time. Yeah, Spurs and ESPN. I've watched Stefan from. It's not fun to game plan against Stefan. It's more fun to cover him. Yeah. As a media person. But yeah, seeing it.

And you wanted Stefan to shoot more and more threes if you were rooting for him because it was the best shot the Warriors could get. You know, he has a 40% opportunity that's worth three points. It's a great possession.

And early on in his career, he wasn't shooting enough with Mark Jackson as the coach. Steve Kerr gets there and suddenly, again, one of the great shooters of Del Curry's era too, Steve Kerr, probably felt underappreciated. I think to date is still the all-time leader in three-point percentage, Steve Kerr, not a bad shooter. But I think he saw an opportunity to make three-point shooting in Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson's three-point shooting. Instead of a side dish,

at the restaurant, the main course. And that's what he did more than Mark Jackson. And that's when you see Stephan's volume go way up because he was designing his offense to get those punctuation marks at the end of the sentence. The clean look for Stephan or Clay. Mark Jackson was good, but not great at doing that exact thing. So if you fast forward now, it's been eight years since that season. What's transpired to where we are today, where it seems like

Things have kind of gotten out of control in some ways. I mean, the overall revelation that three is greater than two and that even an average three-point shooter is a great opportunity for a half-court offense to be efficient has driven a dramatic uptick in three-point activity around the league. I think three-point activity has pretty much doubled in the last 20 years. It crossed 40%.

this season for the first time, which means over 40% of the league shots are now three-point shots. Again, when LeBron was drafted, that figure was 20%. So while LeBron has been the face of the league, there's been this three-point awakening. But yeah, if you go to an NBA game now, you will literally see 70 or 80 three-point attempts in a game, which is crazy. When it started, it almost felt like...

the home run explosion in the late 90s yeah it was so fun yeah it was just like you know i mean i remember towards the end there when it was mcguire and sosa and you know this sort of battle they were like breaking away from you know the five networks were like showing his at bats live it's like you can't even just showing mark mcguire live on every network like it's crazy but that's how it was we were all so enthralled by it and then it kind of became like this is too like it's too much

And it feels like as a fan that now you kind of like everyone's doing it. Yes. And not everyone's doing it well. It's like it's not everybody's Stephen Curry. It's become kind of like I've seen it a lot. And I mean, just anecdotally, people that I talk to or friends that I have, it's like, you know, I think some of them have stopped watching because of what this has done to change the game in some ways, a negative way.

It reached sort of a crisis point for many people. There was a random game between the Bulls and the Hornets earlier this season where the teams combined to miss 75 threes. Okay, so that's almost two a minute. All right, so you go to a 48-minute basketball game, you settle in, and you're just watching teams miss threes. Remember, threes go in 35% of the time. What do they do 65% of the time? Miss. It's a brick.

Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants to see 75 bricks. So when we talk about the rise of three-point shooting, we have to talk about the rise of missed three-point shots, which is not exactly fantastic, to borrow the term from NBA marketing in the 80s. So I think the league is in a precarious position. I love what you said about Major League Baseball, where at first the rise of the long ball was

A poetic parallel. The rise of the long ball was welcomed with open arms, but then eventually sort of people started to get bored and games weren't as exciting. I think it's fair to question whether the NBA is at a similar place as more people like you're describing start talking about it. I think the league is entering a precarious phase.

Do most NBA players need to be open to have a good chance of making a three-pointer?

Yes. A vast majority of NBA players, so at any given time, there's about 500 NBA players. One of the things we've seen in the last 10 or 20 years is almost all of those 500 dudes can hit a three now, but they need optimal conditions. Again, not everybody's Stephen Curry. Most guys need to have their feet set and balanced. It is very hard to throw a nine inch sphere with a nine inch diameter into an 18 inch ring from 25 feet. It's very hard for anyone or anybody.

I don't care if you're Al Horford, but the average NBA player still needs to be open, have their feet set, catch the basketball and immediately shoot it to get to that adequate conversion rate. We've seen one thing I've I've wondered is if players like Will or Shaq played now, would they be doing this? And then I was we saw Rudy Goldbear, like I think it was in preseason maybe or in worms. He started like shooting the three. And I was like,

I remember seeing it and just thinking how just crazy I was. And then I went and looked at his stats and actually he hasn't shot any in games this season. So maybe it was just... But his countryman, his friend from France, Victor Wembenyama. Yeah. Okay. The best young player in the world is 7'3 or 7'4, depending on who you ask. Is taking 48% of his shots from three-point range and 21% of his shots at the rim. That seems wild to me. So...

To answer your question, would Shaq or Wilt be doing this? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Giannis is a great example of somebody who's really not doing it. He's just, I'm physical. I'm going to dominate. Rudy Gobert, Jared Allen. Some of these bigger players don't do it. Yeah. But then there's the Wembanyamas, the Al Horfords, the Brooke Lopez. Some of them are doing it.

And more than any other position over the last five or 10 years, centers have seen the biggest uptick in three-point shooting activity. And I saw a stat last month that said that Wembayama had made 200 three-pointers after 94 games, which was more than Steph or, I mean, way more than Reggie Miller or Ray Allen. Is Wembayama going to be, if he stays healthy, like, is he the obvious choice to become a

the NBA three champion at some point, or because Steph started his career and then he really ramped them up as he went in. Like, like, do you think he catches him and beats him or. Oh man, I hope not. Like, honestly, I hope not. Why? If he wasn't put on planet earth to shoot from 25. Why do you say that? Cause look at him. I mean, for the people that don't know, we're talking about a seven foot four guy who is very fluid athletically. He has the ball handling skills. He can dunk anytime he gets close to the hoop.

For me, the key thing, the NBA is a bizarre business, right? At its core, it relies on families like yours and mine spending hundreds of dollars to go watch other people play basketball. And I think one of the things we're getting at here is that watching these athletes shoot threes is less engaging than watching them fly through the air and dunk the basketball and be a little bit more physical near the hoop.

And so when, when you say that, I think it, it would be really bad if his career ended with him shooting as many threes as Stephen Curry. Okay. So I want to talk through a scenario with you that I've set up. That is that Adam Silver announces on Twitter tomorrow that he's going to step down, but only if Kirk Goldsberry is made the commissioner of the NBA. Yeah. How are you going to solve this, this three point problem?

experimentation. And I think the league used to have more of an innovative spirit. Again, anybody who likes the NBA likes an 80-year-old league that has had some drastic, crazy rule changes in its relatively short history. Okay? Goaltending was legal before it wasn't. Three-point shots didn't exist. Dunking was illegal.

They've changed what kind of defenses were allowed to be played multiple times. To love the NBA is to love a product that has constantly been tinkered with. They need to get back to that experimentation. They need to try things. Not all of them might work. Yeah. Guess what? That's the story of business, too. You have to embrace success and failure if you want to innovate towards something good.

They have to be less afraid of making these changes, just like their ancestors were unafraid of making big changes in the name of what? Making the product more fun for us to watch.

inspiring people to drop $1,000 to go to chase and watch a Warriors game, you better make sure that product is good. And I think they have an opportunity to attack this three-point problem with innovation, but they have to be willing to take the kinds of risks that I don't think they're willing to take at this exact moment. One thing that you've suggested is having the three-point line be sort of determined

by team, by stadium. Can we talk through that idea? Yeah, so one of the cool things about baseball is if I go to a Red Sox game or I go to a Yankees game or I go to a Giants game or a Dodgers game, the dimensions of the home run outcome are different, right? There are field effects, as they call them in baseball. And that makes it really interesting, right? The strategies are a little bit different. A fly ball in one stadium is a home run outcome.

And another, and it makes the outfielders and the hitters a little less comfortable. And I would love to see that in basketball where it wasn't so boilerplate. Every stadium, it would bring back home court advantage to a little bit if the Celtics three-point line was very familiar to them, but very strange to say the Cleveland Cavaliers, the New York Knicks.

So I think that's one idea. Why do we have the exact same three-point line in every gym? I haven't heard a good answer for that, particularly when these shooters are so comfortable. I think making it a little different in each place could bring some diversity to the game. Originally, I thought, well, what do you do? Are you extending the size? And then I've seen some of the

the sort of designs that you come up with in plans to be commissioner someday. And it's like you can't even shoot a corner three anymore. No. Which is a big idea. Well, the corner three is, aka the smartest shot in basketball, is the shortest three on the court. And it only exists because the NBA court is 50 feet wide and to accommodate shooting space at the baseline area, they couldn't make the arc 24 feet consistently around.

the plank surface so they shortened it and those shots now represent one in nine shots in the league and they go in at a ridiculous rate they're not particularly fun to watch

And getting rid of them is one of the things the league has to look at if our goal is to reduce offenses reliance on the three point shot and to reduce the number of threes per game. That short loophole three is the first one they have to look at eliminating.

So in your commissioner reign, no, no four point sponsored shots from 30 feet, no six point half quarters or anything like that. No, I mean, basketball, I would say is my favorite invention that I've, I've encountered in my life. I love the sport. And it's curious to me that every other league on planet earth that matters, what are you talking about? FIBA,

The WNBA, men's college basketball, every other league has moved its line backward in the 21st century except for one, the one with the best shooters on the planet. And that doesn't sit right with me. And I think it's time to really do what these other leagues have done. And if it doesn't work, we can snap back in.

To the current line. You know how I know that? Because David Stern moved the line for three years in the 90s. They moved it in. Right. Which seems crazy now. There was an offensive production level. The points per game went way down. So they moved the line. 100%. Yeah. And they didn't like what it did. So they snapped it right back. And nobody lost their minds. Like Michael Jordan won championships with two different three-point lines in the NBA. Yeah.

It's not such a sacred line that we can't move it. It's so crazy to me that they aren't looking at this. I read, whatever, just Googled the history of it. And from what I read, it's like just a line some old coaches made up 100%.

That's it. 100%. And what's crazier, dude, is what are the chances the right place for the line in 1979 when Larry and Magic were rookies is the right place for the line in 2025 when Stephen Curry is about to retire, you know, when LeBron James is at the very end of his career. The whole game has changed and we're using the same line that these coaches in the 70s drew. That doesn't make any sense.

When you've talked about NBA players being snowflakes. I haven't said that. No, not in that way. Let me do this again. Let me do this again. Not the snowflake, like the uniqueness of a snowflake. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, that word in the internet era has come to mean several things aside from wintry precipitation. That each player is unique. And we see different players who have the exact same

you know, physical height, weight, arm length and all these things playing so vastly different. What do you, as you evaluated players, looked at their stats, like what do you see are the sort of intangible non-data things that people bring to the table that make them, you know, so different? Well, first of all, I'm glad you asked that question because that's my favorite part of the sport. What's that?

The uniqueness of everybody that Michael was trying to do something completely different than Carl Malone in those files and John Stockton and Scotty Pippen, the same thing. I mean, there were vastly different styles. Yeah. And I love that diversity. And one of the things that I would criticize about the current game is it is sort of a canvas that rewards diversity.

more of a homogenous style of play. And that diversity is at the core of basketball. So I think that is point number one. Point number two is the thing that separates great players from good players remains the same. And Michael had it and Kobe had it and Dirk had it and Manu Ginoli had it. And that is just an insane competitive spirit. And some guys have it and some guys don't. And I think that's true in business too, is that

The people who end up being all-stars are one thing. The people who end up being finals MVPs and multiple world champions are insanely driven human beings. And I've had a chance to get to know some of them, and they're the most professional, dedicated people I've been around, but they're also hyper competitive. What percentage of NBA players do you think

are playing basketball as a job? And what percent do you think, like, this was my life's passion, this is my life's work? I don't think you can get to the very top of basketball without being pretty passionate. I mean, some of the taller players, some of the more gifted physical players don't have to love it as much as some of the smaller players. So I think you might find some of the more sort of physically gifted individuals might feel less passionate about

about the thing. But look, billions of people play basketball on this planet, billions. And 500 make this league. You know, you get removed from qualifications if you are not passionate somewhere along the line. Maybe there's a few exceptions to that. That said, I think within that 500, there's still a pretty healthy stratification

of desire to win at the highest levels. I think, I think some of them are almost psychotic about winning. Yeah. What we've seen this like trend with kids sports and preparation to try to just whole industry around, you know, getting kids, you know, playing sports. I mean, I feel like sometimes my kids are playing, like that's all they do is just play sports all the time. Yeah. I don't remember that growing up. So like,

From what you're seeing with players coming into the league, like is starting your kid and playing them at 10 years old in these leagues and sending them around the country, you know, to in some cases to play in tournaments and stuff like is this a requirement now to play professional and collegiate sports? Or is do you see this as like not a prerequisite to doing that? Yeah, that's another great question.

I think one of the more interesting things emerging right now is that the United States of America is not great at building up great basketball players. And the last two number one picks in the NBA draft have come from France. Four of the five all NBA players the last few years have come from other countries. Nikola Jokic is unquestionably the best player in the world as we sit here. He's from Serbia. I think...

I can't speak to professional development in other sports, but I think we play a lot. Europeans practice a lot. And Gina L'Oreal, I think, was the one who pointed this out first to me, the coach of the UConn women's basketball team.

is in Europe, you'll play one or two games a week and you'll practice five or six days a week. In American youth basketball, it tends to be flipped. It's just game, game, game, game, and then we'll wedge in practice when we can. So it's not the amount of games you play. How efficient are you at developing your skills, especially in these key times in your life when you're developing? And I think this extends to higher education.

And I think it extends to business as well. But practice better, not just practice harder, is a big part of this conversation. And I think a lot of people in basketball would say we're not teaching the game as well as we could be. That's a really good insight. There was this executive at

Eda who was one of the kind of on the founding team and as an intern there I'm embarrassing him like how can I get better at knowing what is Good is a good game and what makes a great game and it's kind of was like you're in college like you you could play 20 30 hours of games a week if you want and Think about kids growing up to like you have so much time. Mm-hmm and

That time runs out like there's a point where you don't have that time anymore and it's filled with other things you have to work and go to school and this other stuff and it's interesting how you say that about like really developing the skills I think really spending that time on the right things versus you know what you know maybe feels good feels good to score 10 or 15 points in a game. Yeah, it's it's much harder to go to a gym by yourself for two hours.

Yeah. You might shoot 10 times in a game, a two hour game. Yeah. A shot's about a one second thing. That's 10 seconds of shooting work in a, in a two hour game. If you even get it. Right. If you even get in. Yeah. Um,

I think one of the things I would love to ask you about with EA is at some point during my life as a video game player, EA, my favorite video game company, I loved all their games growing up and continue to play them occasionally, is they introduced practice. Like they introduced in FIFA all those skill games to help you get better.

And it's not lost on me that even in video games, they started to have this realization. We've got to develop the player's skills for the games. And the pie chart of playing games in the video game environment versus practicing changed dramatically. And I think you have to be intentional about developing skills in every facet of life. And when you ask Stephen Curry why he's the best shooter in the world, he's not going to talk about games.

He's going to talk about what my dad was Del Curry, but he made me change my shot my junior year of high school. And we fought for hours about it in the backyard. And I cried and I yelled. But he's going to say it happened in the backyard with my dad helping me raise my release point and change my mechanics. That's where greatness happens, right? That's where greatness happens. It doesn't happen in an AAU game on a Sunday afternoon. How does the NBA get better American players, do you think?

I think USA Basketball, where I've had a chance to work for a few years, has a role to become more of a federation and more of a leader in, you know, teaching and learning the sport to men and women, to young boys and girls. In other countries, for instance, you have to get a license to be a basketball coach.

Not in our country. Interesting. Yeah. So the skills of basketball or for like the skills of coaching. Yeah. All of the above. Yeah. To learn how to deal with certain things, to learn how to teach and run certain things. You have to be a licensed practitioner of the art of coaching. And so I think teaching the teachers is something that we've learned in college.

Look, I can't just walk into the University of Texas and say, I want to be a professor of business. Yeah, I have to get credentialed. I have to prove that I can do research, mentor young people in other environments. And then they let me in and then they select me.

I think there's, there's, there's, there's space for us to learn about educating athletes in, in, from, from inspiration from places like higher education. Yeah. You just walk on one little league field in any diamond in America and you will see this coaches have not gone through training. Although, uh, the positive coaching Alliance, uh, is something that, which is, it's a, it's not required, but it was something that I know that I've, one of the coaches I coached with, uh,

Got me into it and, you know, just trying to be positive, but it doesn't, it's not about skills. It's just really about attitude. And well, that's what it's supposed to be about that days. Right. Yeah. Teaching, teaching kids to love the sport. Yeah. The first thing, but teaching them to love developing in the sport, getting better away from the competitions. Yeah.

That's a skill too. And I think I'm not going to be too hard on America, but when it comes to American basketball, that's the issue is why aren't we building the best players in the world anymore?

Like I'm competitive. I want us to, we're United States of America. We should have the best basketball player. You're going to be the commissioner. So I don't know if I want to be the commissioner, but I also think the NBA could have a seat at that table. And you joke is like the NBA gets better if American basketball gets better at the base of the pyramid.

I've made more friends playing basketball than doing anything else ever. Yeah. And I always knew we moved around a lot growing up and I was in 10 schools in 10 years. And like, but I always knew wherever I went, like I could play basketball. Yeah. And it is this, it's this, I don't know. I've tried to think I don't play as much anymore because every time I play, but I play with my kids and I coach my, my daughter's YMCA team. Let's go.

But, you know, it has this way of bringing people together. And now, you know, the NBA as well, like it really in some ways like brought the culture of America together and brought people from all walks of life together. And in some ways,

It's just different. Well, you look at the origin story of the game. It's a chaplain in Massachusetts, a Canadian man who needed something to do. He needed his sort of troublemaking kids in the winter in Massachusetts to have something to do, to be active, where they wouldn't gouge each other's eyes out or punch each other in the face. So he made this sort of relatively non-contact sport that taught...

the values that he wanted to instill as a Christian and as an American or a Canadian, which is teamwork, fair play, and, you know, working together makes us stronger. I think

That's what the sport's for, man. Like, it's not for LeBron James to sell media rights deals and sneakers. It's for kids to be like, you know what? If we work together, we win. That's the revelation, right? That's the point of sports. That's why. It's not for Maverick to start a new league. Bro, you just said it. Your kids are playing at the YMCA. You know who else will play with the YMCA? Naismith. That's where it came from. We're still doing it.

For the sole purpose. But we get distracted and we start to think that it's something other than what it really is. But that's what it is at its core. And by the way, yeah, you're going to make friends. It was pickleball before pickleball. Like you move to a new city, you go to the park, you start playing hoops. Yeah. You go to college, you go play pickup at the college gym. You meet your best friends for life. That's right. That's what it's for. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is a good moment.

to bring us to why I actually set this up and came to Austin to interview you, which is I need help on my, my girl, my 10 year old girls, YMCA team. Yeah. I kind of have like a, I would say like kind of like a Gene Hackman,

kind of like a Hoosiers coaching style. Yeah. Where, uh, you know, if you shoot, if you don't shoot a layup, like it's kind of like, I need you out of the gym. Yeah. Um, you're bad influence on everyone else. Yeah. And it, you know, my, my daughter and her friends, I don't really, and I really gel with that. Yeah. So, um, you know, even, even the 10 year old girls want to shoot threes. I got some tips here. Yeah. Tell me. You're onto the one. The most obvious one is when you watch 10 year olds play basketball, uh,

All the points happen within four feet of the rim. Maybe one shot a game and you know it. Some kid shoots something for the free throw line. It's a miracle. It goes in off the backboard. The games are won and lost on defense. And my older daughter's team is undefeated right now. I'm not coaching that team, but they press and they destroy. The opponents usually don't get the ball across half court. And what is that? We get ball and we go get, that's how fights get started in the gym.

Yeah. Sometimes the other coaches don't like our defensive strategy. But the turnover percentage for our opponents is probably 60 or 70%. Yeah. And that gives us a lot more shots than them. So you want to get more shots than your opponent at this level. Because you're only going to shoot like 12. If your daughter's league is like mine, it's like 12% field goal percentage. Sounds generous. Yeah. Yeah.

So you just need more than a crack. It's the Michael Jordan three-point percentage. Yes, that's right. You need more bites at the apple, as they say in soccer, to win. That's really good advice. Yeah, thanks. I'll report back.

You know, some leagues have banned the press for this exact reason. Yeah. Ours is not. So yeah. Yeah. Look into that. We're at the age where it starts at the half court and right at the half court. Yeah. Like the great wall. Yeah. And just when you hit that, you know, you kind of got it. You kind of got to run. Are you allowed a double team? A double team. Yeah. So that this, the, all these rules are in place because of my, my daughter's team's exact strategies, which are very effective. Yeah.

There's a really powerful quote in your new book, Hoop Atlas, which I've been thinking about a lot, which is that movements are defined

by moments and disruptive forces. Can you talk about what that means? Yeah. So the book Hoop Atlas, I wrote almost like a jazz history book of basketball where instead of giving credit to the three-point line or analytics, which my first book really examined, I wanted to give credit to the iconoclastic human beings that

changed or deformed the medium of basketball over time. And we've already talked about Stephen Curry. And I would say

He hit a shot in Oklahoma City that I bet you can picture in your head in 2016. They won 73 games and ended up losing in the finals. In overtime. In overtime from 35 feet or whatever against Kevin Durant, who would be his teammate the next year. But he was still in Oklahoma City. But that's an example. We're all watching that game. It was one of the best games of the year. Saturday night. And that moment gave the three-point movement

sort of breath. A moment like Michael's shot in Utah where, you know, Michael was really the first jump shooting superstar. And people say, yeah, Larry Bird or whatever. But no, Michael shot a lot more jumpers than Larry Bird ever did. And he did it all the way to titles. And so his shot over Russell, mid-range jumper, I think was a perfect moment there. The push off you mean? And in sport...

Fair. Yeah. I mean, hey, superstars get calls too. That's true. I have respect for all the Utah fans who think that was a push off. But the quote you're talking about, I think from sort of an art history point of view, these momentary masterpieces of a genre really help us breathe life into understanding a movement that may be years or include thousands of games in some cases.

But the best players always have these iconic moments that sort of capture their essence in a way that I think helps explain their overall impact on the genre, and in this case, basketball. When you spend a lot of time and you push something to the best of your abilities, sometimes you will have these moments. And in business, it could be hiring someone amazing or

I remember years ago, I got like this amazing, I signed this amazing customer and it, it was like culminating on six or seven years of work. And then we got them. And then it just like, you knew it was even in the moment, you knew it was a moment, you know? Um, there it's, it's interesting. Cause like we, you know, we don't think about Steph changing his shot as junior year. We don't think about him going through the ankle injuries he had. We don't think about, um, you know,

him figuring out that he needed to, you know, that he could make 400 threes instead of 269 threes. It's in that moment that like, it's almost like everyone else figures it out then, but it's this culmination of so much work and energy and effort. Yeah. For me, the story is that MIT paper we talked about earlier, and I had worked so hard to, cause nobody had done this. Like nobody had really mapped

at that time, Kobe's shooting behavior or Dirk. Like what made Kobe's fingerprint on the court different than Dirk's? And I knew as I led up to that presentation at MIT that this was my best chance. And I crafted the thing. I worked really hard on what I was going to say in front of these people, every paragraph in the paper. And for me, that was the moment. And I had one chance. And fortunately for me, it worked out.

But that was the moment I got the opportunity to become basketball analytics guy. And when people look back at my career, that's the moment they're going to zero in on. And that's my moment. But I think that's true. A lot of people get a chance to prove it. For the Patriots dynasty, it was the 2001 Super Bowl, right? The Rams are heavily favored.

Tom Brady is making his first Super Bowl start as a huge underdog. They get announced as a team instead of individuals, which was the convention at the time. And they come out and shock the world. And that will always be the moment they were introduced. So I think a lot of these movements do have one big moment. Another thing that you talked about in Hoop Atlas was

this idea of greatness. And you said, how great is he? Well, it depends on what you value. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes about writing is from J.M. Kutseya, who's a South African man and went to the University of Texas, won the Nobel Prize in literature. And I think the Man Booker Prize two or three times.

But his definition of greatness has always stuck with me from writing is the true great people deform the medium they work in. They don't just thrive within a medium. They challenge it and bend it or break it. And you can talk about Faulkner or Melville or Shakespeare. These people all changed the game. And that quote,

really got me thinking about basketball. And I noticed the same thing. Michael Jordan changed the game. Stephen Curry changed the game. That's

Deforming conventional wisdom is true greatness in a lot of media and I think that you know, it's basketball writing music technology Steve Jobs changed the game right like I think that for me is what greatness is you you talk a lot in the book about Allen Iverson and he's such a great example this because

I mean, I wasn't really aware until you went in detail about it. His stats aren't amazing. Yeah. But I had those, those were the first Reeboks I ever had were Allen Iverson shoes and his

impact you, you hear players talking about him. It was not, and it was not just Bathwell, it was culture too. I mean, he, he crossed over. Um, and he was this person that at six feet, if he is that tall, uh, that it seemed like we could all relate to. And, um, but if you, if you measure greatness just by stats, uh, and I think in the business world, um, we, we interviewed somebody recently who was an investor and, um,

you know and and i had said something to him like hey you've made it and he's like well i think you mean like from a financial standpoint yeah but like actually like outside of that like i'm i'm still a work in progress right if we just measure greatness by you know as you're on a bank account or

you know, how many rings you had or this or that or the other, like there's so many other aspects of life and you get the wrong answer. You get the wrong answer. Yeah. And I think analytics really are still at risk for this. The things that are easiest to measure are not always the best things to measure. And if I told you that Kenny G sold a lot more albums than John Coltrane, would you conclude that that means he's a better saxophone player?

than John Coltrane because I might conclude the opposite. And that's where Iverson, the Iverson career is really interesting in sort of a 21st century analytical discourse. Like he was criticized for being inefficient. He's the money ball. The first guy whose career was really put up on trial. And statistically, some of his numbers don't great. A

don't look great. But if you talk to Stephen Curry or James Harden or DeMar DeRozan, you say, what do you think, Alan? Oh, that's the best. He's my favorite player of all time. And you have to listen to that. You have to, you have to, there's other proxies that are inconvenient to measure that are still vital to understanding the phenomenon you're looking at. So don't let the convenience of measurement dictate your conclusion. There's this famous scene in Moneyball where

Brad Pitt. I still laugh every time I watch it where he's sitting with these scouts. I had to look up if these scouts were actually, they're so convincing. I thought maybe they'd like brought in these, these old baseball scouts. They're not, they're all actors, unfortunately, but, and they're like sitting around, they're talking about like, Hey, who should we, who should we pick? And one guy's like, well, this guy has a lot of confidence. Yeah. He's going to be good. And then another guy's like, Oh, well, you know,

You know, this this guy like, you know, he's got a good chin or whatever. He's got the he looks the part. And, you know, and then somebody's like, well, he doesn't get on base like, well, it's just, you know, he can't hit a curveball. It's like, well, yeah, but, you know, he will. Yeah. And and then Brad Pitt says, no, we're card counters. The NBA was kind of doing this before. Right. They had had these like what do you how would you describe that?

So what are they doing now? I teach sports analytics at the University of Texas. So of course we read Moneyball every semester, every year. And I always ask my students at the end of it, what's Moneyball about? And they always get the wrong answer to me, of course, as the professor. They always say it's about using data and stats to make better decisions. And that's obviously true. But the real lesson to me, the fact that this happens in 2003 at the beginning of a new century,

is it's about the infiltration of financial reasoning into everything. It's called Moneyball. It's about bringing business school ideology, for better or worse, into things like cinema and sports and music. It's about integrating financial concepts, financial thinking into everything.

And Michael Lewis is a master of writing. Billy Bean was a perfect character. But really, it was the irreversible infiltration of financial reasoning into things that were not really thought of to be financial institutions, like a batting order or a scouting order.

a scouting endeavor for a baseball team or drafting. These were not perceived to be analytical sort of financial predicaments. What that book changed and that movie changed is now they are forevermore. So I want you to put your commissioner hat back on. This generation of stars, LeBron, Steph, KD, they're all exiting in the next couple of years. What's

What do you think the impact is going to be in positive or negative? Yeah, well, first of all, they're incredible. And LeBron came into the year, thankfully, the fall, the same year of 2003 that Michael exited his Wizards era. So 2003, the torch almost literally is passed from Jordan to LeBron. And so when LeBron leaves, like,

There's obviously a question about what's going to happen. Stefan and Katie, I'd put in that same category, maybe a little bit below LeBron, but I think it is a fair question. What we talked about a little bit earlier was basketball itself is in fantastic shape. And I think Michael and LeBron deserve the most credit because when Michael started playing basketball, it wasn't the second biggest sport in the world. We didn't have kids from Serbia or Brazil playing.

or China dreaming of playing in the NBA. Now we do. That's a great place. And we owe that to Michael and his peers and LeBron, Stefan and those guys. So I think what we're going to see again, more like the EPL is this globalized talent pool. And one of the big questions I have in the world is starting to suggest it is the next player like that is probably not going to be American. And how are we going to deal with that? Basketball is great.

The NBA as an American business institution, it might have some growing pains as more and more of its best players are not American. The American market might be less interested. So then it's like, how do you become a global basketball league? How do you take advantage of media rights in Europe, China, Africa, South America? How do you really become the global brand? I think the EPL and Champions League soccer industry

offer a really nice blueprint for how to achieve some of this. But the good news is, unlike football or baseball, like the sport is truly global and you have an opportunity to capitalize on that. Who do you think is going to be the first hundred million dollar a year player? Luka Doncic, maybe Wemby. Those are my two favorites.

It depends less on the quality of those guys' players and when their contract years are, if you know how the collective bargaining agreement is structured, the percentage of the cap and the basketball revenue. Whose contract year is going to come up at the exact right moment to get that fresh deal? How many of the 30 teams do you think are actually trying to win? And I don't mean the teams tanking to get better draft picks. So take them out, take the ones that are like really going for it.

Well, as we just talked about money, about winning the unfair game or winning the business game, winning the standings, winning the title. I think everybody's trying to win, but their definition of winning is different. Yeah, winning the title. Winning the title less than you think because look at the Celtics. They have an incredible roster, but they're paying literally $300 million in luxury taxes to keep that team together, right? Yeah.

I don't know about you, but many owners I know, billionaires, aren't willing to do that. Yeah. So does that mean they're not trying to win? Well, they're not sending a $300 million check to New York just for fun so all their other 29 competitors can split it. So I think everybody's trying to win within the constraints of the rules. And many of the owners are making tough financial decisions about how far they're willing to go to build a championship roster.

You did such a good job as commissioner. You've now decided you need a new challenge. You want to become the GM of a team. The next evolution of the game, where do you think it's going? How would you build a team if you started today? Bigs. I mean, we're going back to the future. The oldest games in the world. Who had George Mikan? Who had Wilt? Who had Kareem? That's where this is going. Really? You have to get big again. If you look at Jokic and you look at Wemby, to me,

Skills have now made their way all the way through the front court and these guys can dribble pass and shoot. And so you're going to need to be big across the floor. And I feel that the smallest players in the league, those Iverson type characters are the next ones. They're going to have to find new ways to stay in the league because last 10 years ago is bigs who are having trouble.

They came back with three-point shots and passing and dribbling, and now it's going to be the smaller players that I think have trouble. If you could choose from any of the coaches, if you want a coach that actually helps your team play better and win games, who are a couple people you might pick? I think I work for Pop. I love Pop. I love Steve Kerr. But the younger coaches, I think Kenny Atkinson, Will Hardy,

Jamal Mosley in Orlando would be my favorite coaches right now. Maybe Mark Dagnall in Oklahoma City. But young coaches that have a feel for where this is going on offense and defense. And those guys all fit that bill. You've worked off and on with Bill Simmons over the years at some of his different companies and startups. Yeah. What's something you've learned from his leadership style and how he operates internally?

uh you know his teams and then i'd love to hear a take a boston take a bad boston take that he has a head boston take um okay well bill like from a business point of view i've been an executive to he's created great cultures where he's been um particularly at grantland my first stint with bill it was the greatest job i ever had and it was just why is that it was fun he let us be us

He was like more like, I would say the most underrated thing about Bill Simmons is he's like Lorne Michaels. He knows how to cast. He knows how to identify talent. And he put a bunch of random talent together and just let us be us. And people don't do that enough. And he's really good at identifying talent and letting that talent do what it wants to do. And again...

That is something that I've worked at other places. That is not always the case. But he has created that culture. I'm with him again at the ringer and it's fantastic. Again, I get to do whatever I want.

He trusts me to do that. And I really appreciate that. He's given me some big breaks, but he's given me a lot of platforms to be who I want to be. And again, not to form the meeting, but to challenge the medium of sports writing. He's let me do that. And I wanted to do that with nerd nerdy stuff and graphics and maps. He was the perfect person to let me find my voice, um, because he, he gave us very long rope, um, to play with. Um,

He thinks the Celtics are better than they actually are in history. He knows they've won more titles than anybody else, but he always conveniently overlooks that a vast majority of those titles were before 1990.

And since then, my beloved Spurs have dominated the NBA more than any other team. So, you know, I love Bill. I love his relationship with the Celtics. And I like to tease them that, yeah, they've won, what, two titles in the last 30 or 40 years. That's nice. But my Spurs have won five. So, you know, facts are facts. Who's the human being you most admire?

Oh my gosh. Well, I start with my mom. I know that's a corny answer, but she's giving me everything. And I grew up in a single parent household. And as a parent now, I can understand how hard that was. Possible. Yeah. So shout out to all the parents, but the single parents are incredible people. Outside of my own family, I've always loved Bob Dylan. And again, challenging your medium, challenging what...

constraints are around you and deforming something in pursuit of greatness is always something I admire and I think he's done that with popular music and American music at a level that I just find so admirable. So that would be sort of my creative answer. If you could implant one idea, something that you know into everyone else in the world, what would that be? I would say

You know, growing up the way I did without a lot of money, I think having faith that you could be a leader, having faith. I always say to my students, you are those people. And what I mean by that is when you see the president or you see a CEO, even if you're a first generation college student in this country, you have an opportunity to be those people. For me, the greatest barrier to that was my own insecurity and fear.

You know, especially once people reach college, helping people unlock that confidence about their own fate is the best thing I can help somebody with.

And my favorite students grew up first generation college students, single parent families, and they're going off to, that's the greatness that I love to see the most. And one of the things I like about basketball is a true meritocracy. You see people achieving that from all over the planet. And it gives me faith that you can do it in other domains. But having that confidence, I think, is something that really sets some people back. They just don't believe in themselves. What do you think is the hardest thing you ever accomplished?

I had this idea that cartography and sports could be best friends. And people thought I was crazy. And I didn't make billions like some of the people you get to interview on this program.

But I proved it and I'm very proud that following my own passion with that confidence could marry the thing I was really good at with the thing I loved the most. And I think it was hard for me to convince myself to believe in that. You unlock the thing that you were supposed to do, it seems like. When I read these books and when you, when I, when you, when as an outsider read your work, it's you, it's,

It's sort of like, wow, you're like the perfect person to do this. And it's just like kind of comes out on the pages. Yeah, thanks, man. That means a lot. But yeah, like it's just a cliche of following your heart, believing in yourself. Like I've seen it from my vantage point as a teacher. Some of the best students, they don't believe in themselves. I know it's a cliche, but following your dreams, following your passion. So many people don't do it.

And once you get to a point where you feel like you're pretty good at something, I would encourage especially young people to do that. And if it gets weird, again, to challenge the medium that you want to work in, whether that's finance or startups or art. Yeah, like push on the edge of that thing. And for me, it was like putting maps into sports articles. I'm going to challenge that as a weird corner of the world that I knew people would want to see it if I could make it look good.

And again, that was hard for me to convince myself that I was worthy of that. I'm glad I did. As a Harvard professor, Clay Christensen, to end it, how will you measure your life? Yeah, as a family person, you know, I think, you know, this is a dad. That's really it. As a husband. I think Adrian Wojnarowski, who I got to know at ESPN, had a pretty powerful quote that emerged from when he went to, I think it was,

Chris Martinson's funeral services. Chris Martinson worked with us at ESPN for a long time. And Adrian Wojnarowski looked around and was like, there's not a lot of ESPN people here. And it was his family. And Woj left ESPN a few months later. And, you know, ultimately you're going to be defined by the people closest to you and what they think of you and how you think, how that relationship goes. So

I'd love to say it was about mapping basketball, but I don't think so. Thank you. Thank you so much. Divot on next week's episode. The best athletes in the world that you and I know, they practice like crazy. They get up at 5 a.m., they go to the gym, they practice. To get a three-pointer right, they've tried it a thousand times before. Every day, right? So you learn so much from practice. But I believe the most you learn is from failures. Failures of yours...

failures of your coaches and failures of your mentors, friends and advisors.