"Young Executives Are Coming of Age"
Fresh Faces Molding Teams' Futures
By Greg Sandoval, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2003
As the 27-year-old director of player personnel for the San Antonio Spurs, Sam Presti knows what he wants -- to be the Warren Buffett of the NBA.
Presti hopes to select basketball players as shrewdly as Buffett -- one of the world's most successful investors -- chooses stocks.
"I'm in a similar business really," Presti said. "I'm in a futures market. Teams are trying to predict the appreciation of an asset at the same time they identify ways to help grow that asset."
Presti at times sounds like an investment banker rather than an executive of an NBA team, and it's no wonder. He is among a small but growing number of whiz kid executives applying modern business practices and technologies to big league sports. The practice of injecting quantitative analysis into the athletic world has gained a foothold in baseball, with young executives of at least five major league teams using it in their player evaluations. But Presti is among the first to take this model and apply it to the NBA.
The fruits of Presti's work will be on the court at MCI Center on Saturday night, when the Spurs play the Wizards. Presti assumed his current position last summer. But in his previous role as the team's special assistant for basketball operations, he was a major factor in assembling a lineup that last season won the NBA championship. This included drafting rising star Tony Parker, a point guard from France, two years ago and endorsing efforts to bring Turkish-born forward Hedo Turkoglu to San Antonio from Sacramento.
In baseball, some of Presti's contemporaries, people such as Theo Epstein, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, and Paul DePodesta, assistant general manager of the Oakland Athletics, have leapfrogged more-experienced executives by impressing owners with their versatility. They unscramble player contracts, skillfully decipher market-cap rules and slash inefficiencies.
"General managers used to do handshake deals and jot the terms down on napkins," said Kevin Towers, general manager of the San Diego Padres. "Nowadays, you have to get out a payroll-summary sheet. You have to understand contractual language, no-trade provisions, escalators, the way bonuses are structured. . . . It's very complicated."
Perhaps the most important attribute the new executives share in this era of skyrocketing player salaries and flat revenue growth is a desire to operate teams more on a corporate model by tightly controlling costs and risk. They crunch traditional statistics -- be it slugging percentages in baseball or free throw percentage in basketball -- looking for new ways to more accurately measure an athlete's skills. The goal is to reduce the risk of making a bad draft pick or paying too much for a free agent.
When their methods work, they manage to put together winning teams of lesser-known, lower-cost players. The Spurs' payroll ranks 20th in the 29-team NBA.
"Owners are tired of losing money," Towers said. "They want people who manage their payroll wisely, put a good product on the field and turn a profit."
DePodesta, 30, of Alexandria, is credited with helping A's General Manager Billy Beane develop Oakland's seemingly limitless pipeline of stars that has propelled the club into the playoffs four consecutive years.
DePodesta is known in business parlance as a "quant." He pours over statistics in his laptop to dig up talented but overlooked free agents or potential draft picks. Beane and DePodesta refuse to assess players solely on the opinions of sage scouts, whom the A's say are statistically wrong as often as they are right. Crunching numbers is just another way to hedge their bets, DePodesta said.
But statistics are just one part of the equation, and teams always need scouts, said DePodesta, who two years ago turned down an offer to become general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Statistics, for example, can't reveal whether a player has trouble getting along with teammates, drinks too much or doesn't like to practice.
"A mutual-fund manager won't pour money into a stock after only reading a financial report," DePodesta said. "If he's smart, he's also going to talk to the company's executives. We want to combine the subjective with the objective. All we're trying to do is take out as much of the guesswork we can."
In addition to their business smarts, Epstein, Presti and DePodesta have wowed coworkers and bosses with their hustle. Epstein, 29, earned his law degree at the University of San Diego at night while working 70 hours a week for the Padres.
Towers, Epstein's former boss, remembered asking him to prepare the complex statistics the team would need for salary arbitration cases. Some major league teams, Towers said, hire law firms to compile data that show what an arbitration-eligible player should earn, a process that can take up to two weeks and incur $50,000 in fees. Epstein plunked the brief down on Towers's desk the next day. "The work he was able to turn out was incredible," Towers said.
Presti is described much the same way in San Antonio.
A former basketball player at Division III Emerson College in Boston, where he was the school's first Rhodes Scholar candidate, Presti once wrote up a contract that legally bound each of his teammates to play hard. After learning of Presti's promotion with the Spurs, one of those teammates, Alex Tse, said, "I don't mean any disrespect to the people who held his job previously, but there's no doubt in my mind that Sam outworked them."
When the Spurs hired Presti as a $250-a-month intern three years ago, Presti immediately immersed himself in the history of the NBA draft. He noted which first-round picks flopped and which late-round picks flourished. He created charts and spreadsheets to unearth patterns and tendencies. Presti refused to disclose exactly what he discovered, citing the competitive pressures of the NBA, but said the Spurs have since put his findings to use.
Presti said the Spurs are experimenting with new ways to analyze statistics to gauge player performance. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is using similar methods to put together his team, one of the best in the league.
"I told [Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich] within two weeks after we hired Sam, 'Pop, this is a guy we need to keep,' " said Spurs General Manager R.C. Buford, who has promoted Presti in each of his three years with the club.
Presti crisscrosses the United States to scout high school and college players. Gym rats in countries such as Greece, Spain and Serbia and Montenegro recognize him when he swings through to see foreign players. One European scout dubbed him the "NBA's Indiana Jones."
Presti was still in his first year with the Spurs when he pressed the team not to give up on drafting Parker after the French-born guard had a poor pre-draft workout. Presti created a five-minute highlight videotape of Parker that persuaded Popovich to give Parker, then 19, another look, Buford said.
The Spurs chose Parker with the 28th pick of the first round in the 2001 NBA draft. About two weeks into the season, Parker was made a starter. Last season, he averaged 15 points and five assists while helping the Spurs win the championship. Few of the guards drafted before Parker, such as Brandon Armstrong, Kedrick Brown and Joseph Forte, have come close to his impact. Forte is already out of the league.
Presti, whom one NBA executive said is almost certain to be courted by other teams for a front-office job, said he has only begun to apply business management techniques to professional basketball.
"I don't think it makes sense for me to account for my age or how many years I've been in the business," he said. "That's where I think I have an advantage on some who've been around for a while. They are used to doing things a certain way. I go ahead and challenge those concepts."
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