New Wizards senior vice president of player personnel Travis Schlenk was in the Warriors’ front office when they helped usher in a 3-point revolution with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. New president of Monumental Basketball Michael Winger helped build one of the NBA’s best 3-point shooting teams as general manager of the LA Clippers. New Wizards GM Will Dawkins cut his teeth working for the Thunder, a team often associated with modern team-building methods.
Yet each of them first pointed to intangibles like personality, mental makeup and team chemistry when asked what they look for in a player. That speaks to their collective belief in striking a balance between relying on analytics and traditional scouting methods.
Schlenk summed it up most succinctly.
“To me, that’s just a piece of the puzzle, right? I do look at them. I do find them interesting. But they’re not the driving force of mine. I fortunately have a big gut and I go by my gut, ” he joked to NBC Sports Washington.
All that said, there is some evidence in the numbers. Within two years of Schlenk taking over the Hawks in 2017, Atlanta was attempting over 10 more threes per game, going from 26.1 attempts on average in 2016-17 to 37.0 per game in 2018-19. They remained steady in the mid-to-high 30s until this past season when Schlenk was phased out of their day-to-day front-office duties.
The practical application of analytics is not as simple as whether a team shoots a lot of threes. But it is one obvious indicator and in the case of Schlenk’s Hawks, they seemed to immediately take on the mentality of the Warriors organization he left. Schlenk infused the team with outside shooters like Trae Young and Kevin Huerter, who helped Atlanta reach the conference finals in 2021.
Winger’s time running the Clippers was largely driven by the acquisition of Kawhi Leonard in free agency and Paul George via trade in 2019. But throughout Winger’s tenure, LA also saw a massive increase in 3-point shooting volume. They averaged 25.8 3-point attempts per game in 2017-18, right before he was hired, and by 2019-20 were taking 34.7 threes per game, an increase of nearly 10 threes per contest in just two years.
“It’s a part of the formula,” Winger said to NBC Sports Washington when discussing analytics in general. “I think [that] we’d be foolish not to apply analytics. Sometimes you can overdo it, sometimes you can underdo it. I think the magic is in applying the right amount of analytics with the right amount of visual observation with the right amount of interpretative intel. I don’t know that there is a very clear, repeatable prescription. But I think it’s foolish not to include it and, in my personal opinion, I think it’s high-risk to rely on it exclusively.”
The Thunder were undergoing an aggressive rebuild in recent years when Dawkins served as their vice president of basketball operations. That means to a certain extent their overall identity as a team is still in the early stages. Chet Holmgren hasn’t even taken the floor. Many of their young players are still developing their games.
Still, you can see signs of an analytics-based approach in their overall performance. The Thunder also saw a significant uptick in 3-point attempts in recent years, from 30.2 per game in 2018-19 to a franchise-record 37.4 in 2021-22.
Oklahoma City also puts a substantial emphasis on forcing turnovers, as they ranked No. 1 in the NBA last season in the category at 16.8 per game. In some NBA front offices, analytics departments come up with separate, metrics-based draft boards to compare and contrast to the team’s overall, scouting-based board. Steals and blocks represent positive defensive outcomes and are accounted for.
The Wizards, meanwhile, were 29th out of 30 teams last season in forcing turnovers (12.3 per game). And despite the league’s overall trend towards taking and making more threes, they have regressed in that area. After taking a franchise-record 33.3 threes per game in 2018-19, Washington attempted fewer on average last season (31.7), ranking 21st in the NBA.
When asked how much analytics dictate his approach, Dawkins gave data a strong endorsement.
“A lot, a lot. I haven’t got a feel for what’s in place here now. I’m looking forward to that. But the days of just going out and watching a guy and picking him are [pretty much] over. The game has evolved, the players have evolved. You’ve gotta make sure you’re covering the analytics, you’re covering their background, the intel. You’re covering the basketball [with] your eyes, your ears and the numbers,” he explained.
“But also the mental space, making sure you have a plan in place for that, making sure you have a holistic approach in player development and with what they’re putting into their bodies. Everybody’s plan is individualistic. There’s no longer ‘the team lifts over here and everyone is working on the same thing.’ That’s just antiquated. So, making sure you have all five of those phases covered will be really important.”
A key part of that comment is that Dawkins doesn’t yet have a grasp on what analytics resources the Wizards currently have in place. He’s likely to realize soon that they have already made a large investment in that regard.
Over the previous four years under then-team president Tommy Sheppard and previous Monumental Basketball executive Sashi Brown, the Wizards expanded their analytics and research department exponentially with a long list of hires including vice president of research and information systems Kathy Evans and a team of model – building programmers. Although he’s now moved on, they had Dean Oliver, a revolutionary in basketball analytics, on their coaching staff.
That investment just hasn’t led to wins, or even a roster synonymous with the most basic analytics-based approach of volume 3-point shooting. Maybe Winger, Dawkins and Schlenk can find a way to reap the benefits of that work.