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Report: Kings hire ex-Mavs VP Roland Beech as new head of analytics
The Sacramento Kings' decision last month to "part ways" with director of player personnel Dean Oliver, one of the foremost pioneers in the field of basketball analytics and the author of the seminal book "Basketball on Paper", was initially presented as an indication of Kings head honcho Vlade Divac's staunch opposition to "the use of analytics in evaluating players." Subsequent reports, however, suggested that Divac — a Sacramento legend hired by owner Vivek Ranadivé in what many believed was a business-side capacity, only to become the franchise's top basketball decision-maker — aimed not to scrap the Kings' analytics efforts, but rather to make his own hire to head up the department. (Oliver was hired last fall by Pete D'Alessandro, the general manager whom Divac replaced as the Kings' top basketball exec. D'Alessandro left Sacramento in June.)
According to ESPN.com's Marc Stein, Vlade's found his man:
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The Sacramento Kings have come to terms with Roland Beech to hire the longtime NBA sabermetrician to head up their analytics department, according to league sources. [...]
Beech spent the last six seasons with the Dallas Mavericks, most recently working as vice president of basketball operations.
Beech is the founder of 82games.com, a long-running and respected stats website that helped bring analytical filters like five-man lineup data, on-court/off-court splits, "clutch" scoring production and team shot clock usage into the public eye. Mavericks owner, tech billionaire and analytics aficionado Mark Cuban was an early fan of 82games — he "found the site in like two weeks" after its launch, Beech said back in 2009 — and brought Beech on as a consultant for the 2005-06 season before eventually hiring him in a full-time capacity.
Beech served as an assistant coach on the championship-winning 2010-11 Mavericks, sitting behind the bench and regularly communicating with head coach Rick Carlisle in an effort to help Dallas continually find its best five and exploit opponents' weaknesses:
The Mavericks knew which lineups and pairings worked for them and optimized their rotations accordingly. But it wasn’t just about personnel usage in the NBA Finals — it was play calls, game planning and countless in-season adjustments that built to this moment.
“Roland was a key part to all his,” Cuban said. “I give a lot of credit to Coach Carlisle for putting Roland on the bench and interfacing with him, and making sure we understood exactly what was going on. Knowing what lineups work, what the issues were in terms of play calls and training.”
“It makes a difference. I think Jason [Kidd] and [Jason Terry] and Dirk [Nowitzki] and Tyson Chandler make a whole lot more difference, but if you don’t know what’s going on it’s hard for you to get smarter and get better.”
Accomplishing both those goals figures to be of paramount importance for a Kings club that entered last season harboring playoff hopes and got off to a hot start before everything fell apart, leading to a ninth-straight sub-.500 finish.
Star center DeMarcus Cousins got meningitis. Coach Michael Malone got fired. The team got worse. George Karl got hired, and the "circus" came to town, and thus began months of Boogie Cousins trade talk.
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As dark as things have seemed in Sacramento, though, there's still hope for a brighter tomorrow. Cousins and Karl are reportedly working out their issues. Divac drafted a potential defensive difference-maker in Kentucky's Willie Cauley-Stein, and rebounded from a very rough trade and multiple reported refusals to take Ranadivé's money by adding multiple pieces — Rajon Rondo, Kosta Koufos, Marco Belinelli, Caron Butler, Seth Curry — who could compliment Cousins on the court and make the Kings an interesting watch. (You can say that much for the Kings, at least — they figure to be compelling, one way or another.)
It remains to be seen whether Karl can juggle all those new pieces well enough to make Sacramento a possible contender for one of the final playoff spots in the Western Conference. (I'm sure Boogie, like Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving before him, would love to get his name off the list of the best players who've never made the postseason.) Beech's talent for identifying optimal lineups and player pairings could prove a valuable resource as Karl and the Kings continue their search for the right mix, both in the season to come and in the years ahead ... provided, of course, the famously outside-the-box-thinking and deck-shuffling Ranadivé permits this iteration of his staff to stick with its latest plan.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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