gq: Muthuball: How to Build an NBA Championship Team This year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the summit of the wonkiest minds in sports, hardly resembled its inaugural event, in 2007, when 175 geeks gathered in classrooms on MIT’s campus to discuss their budding cottage industry. Having expanded recently to two days, and moved to a convention center in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, there were far fewer pocket protectors among the 2,200 attendees than league commissioners, team executives, and even cerebral athletes. The panels with recognizable names took place on elevated stages in spaces as vast as airplane hangars. Everyone in the audience was looking for an edge on the competition, fully aware that the next Moneyball-like, game-changing idea would probably come from someone sitting next to them. Meanwhile, the heart of the conference still pumped through two smaller rooms at the end of a hallway, adjacent to a game area with a Pop-A-Shot. One room was devoted to research presentations. The other was reserved for a series of talks called Evolution of Sport. The EOS talks were billed as the “opportunity to present a message, an idea or a revolutionary thought that could someday change the face of sport”—TED talks for an audience fluent in ESPN. According to conference organizers, the EOS edicts were to be bold, unique, inventive, analytical, concise, respectful, curious, humorous, honest, and, most of all, inspiring. Over eighty EOS were submitted for consideration; eleven were chosen to inspire. The only undergraduate in that group was a Stanford University senior named Muthu Alagappan. He was presenting on behalf of Ayasdi, a company run by Stanford mathematicians, whose proprietary software is used by physicians, environmentalists, and the government to understand cancer, diabetes, and oil spills. Muthu had used it to scheme the NBA. Wrote something for GQ! 

gq:

Muthuball: How to Build an NBA Championship Team

This year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the summit of the wonkiest minds in sports, hardly resembled its inaugural event, in 2007, when 175 geeks gathered in classrooms on MIT’s campus to discuss their budding cottage industry. Having expanded recently to two days, and moved to a convention center in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, there were far fewer pocket protectors among the 2,200 attendees than league commissioners, team executives, and even cerebral athletes. The panels with recognizable names took place on elevated stages in spaces as vast as airplane hangars. Everyone in the audience was looking for an edge on the competition, fully aware that the next Moneyball-like, game-changing idea would probably come from someone sitting next to them.

Meanwhile, the heart of the conference still pumped through two smaller rooms at the end of a hallway, adjacent to a game area with a Pop-A-Shot. One room was devoted to research presentations. The other was reserved for a series of talks called Evolution of Sport. The EOS talks were billed as the “opportunity to present a message, an idea or a revolutionary thought that could someday change the face of sport”—TED talks for an audience fluent in ESPN. According to conference organizers, the EOS edicts were to be bold, unique, inventive, analytical, concise, respectful, curious, humorous, honest, and, most of all, inspiring. Over eighty EOS were submitted for consideration; eleven were chosen to inspire.

The only undergraduate in that group was a Stanford University senior named Muthu Alagappan. He was presenting on behalf of Ayasdi, a company run by Stanford mathematicians, whose proprietary software is used by physicians, environmentalists, and the government to understand cancer, diabetes, and oil spills. Muthu had used it to scheme the NBA.

Wrote something for GQ! 

Tags: longreads