Garrick Barr & Synergy Sports Technology

"An inside game, a high-tech way: Barr's product provides a clear picture behind the stats"
by Bob Young
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 13, 2006 12:00 AM

Maybe Garrick Barr was born to revolutionize the way professional basketball teams use technology.

He might change the way you use it, too, if you happen to be a basketball fan.

What Barr, a former Suns video coordinator, has done is build Synergy Sports Technology, a Web-based service for NBA teams that is expanding into colleges, international basketball and soon might become part of an interactive fan feature at NBA.com.

Essentially, his company puts statistical data and video together, and makes it available to teams almost immediately and for many different uses, from player evaluation to scouting to coaching.

"He played college basketball, coached in college, son of an engineer. It's the perfect marriage of the technology and the person," said David Griffin, vice president and assistant general manager of the Suns.

"He's the most qualified person on the planet for what he has done."

Barr launched the company three years ago. This is the first NBA season in which the company has provided full service to teams, but Barr said the company will be cash-flow positive by next year.

Right now, five NBA teams are using the service, paying between $50,000 and $75,000 for the season, and several others are considering it.

It's less clear when his investors will begin seeing a return because the company already is looking into growing the core business by expanding to other sports while exploring other ways to leverage the technology.

Among Barr's backers is the NBA's biggest techie, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who made his fortune by co-founding Broadcast.com.


How it works

Let's say that Cuban's Mavericks have just lost to the Suns and gave up too many fastbreak points in the loss.

Mavericks coach Avery Johnson wants to know what went wrong. About 20 minutes after the end of the game, his video scouts can use Barr's service to provide video "edits" - clips - of every Phoenix fastbreak in the game.

He also can get every Dallas transitional situation for the entire season to see how that night's game compared to others.

Or, he could ask for:

• All the plays in which Steve Nash came off to his left in the Suns' bread-and-butter pick-and-roll game - in that game or all season.

• The plays in which Nash went all the way to the basket, pulled up for jump shot or passed.

• A breakdown to determine how successful Nash is when he goes left, whether he's more likely to shoot or pass in that situation and whether he's more likely to go to the rim or pull up - all with links to video clips to see why it all happens.

And it can all be done online with a couple of mouse clicks, or downloaded and put on a DVD - just in case the Mavericks have a plane to catch and Johnson wants to look at it all of this in the air.

"The system allows us to look at every play, in every way, and to tie it back to stats," Cuban said via e-mail. "So, we can watch how we played every pick and roll, track our success rate and also see how other teams are doing it.

"It's an invaluable resource that makes us smarter when combined with a lot of advanced statistical analysis we do."


Basketball background

It helps that Barr knows the game as well as the technology.

A former high school teammate of Paul Westphal's at Aviation High in Redondo Beach, Calif., Barr played at UC Irvine and later worked as an assistant coach under Westphal at Grand Canyon College.

Barr came with Westphal to the Suns, and in 11 years as the team's video coach he came up with a lot of ideas about how to combine statistical information with video to more efficiently analyze players and teams.

Usually, he gave those ideas to the various vendors, who called on the Suns with their latest video editing equipment.

"Everybody that came in wanted to hire him," Griffin remembers.

Barr noticed as he went around the league with the Suns that much of that equipment ended up gathering dust.

So in 1998 he founded Quantified Scouting Service, which logged virtually every possession of NBA games to provide offensive tendencies reports.

It was a first step, and in 2003, Barr decided it was time to take it further, quit giving away his ideas and launch a company that could combine the statistical analysis with video and make it available in real time.

He left the Suns.


Tech support

With the advantage of a coaching background, he knew what his clients would want, and with an intimate knowledge of his competition, he knew what they were - or were not - getting.

What he didn't know was whether technology would support it or what it might cost.

A family member hooked him up with Nils Lahr, a former Microsoft engineer and chief architect of iBeam Broadcast Corp., which once was one of Silicon Valley's first big online content providers.

To say Lahr is an expert on streaming video is an understatement. In the tech world, he is Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, a superstar.

"Garrick knew what he wanted to do. He could imagine the workflow. He just didn't know if the technology would get him from point A to point B," Lahr said.

Lahr got him there.

"When I was at Microsoft six years ago, there is nothing we're doing now that we couldn't have done then," he said. "But the startup cost at that time would have been millions and millions. We had to invent a few things that didn't exist for this, but the technology at that time would have worked. However, the business model would have killed it.

"Now, every two or three months you read a press release about somebody in sports trying to do something else on the Internet. The industry has grown by $200million just from last year. It's growing exponentially.

"With streaming video and stats together on the Internet, we can include fans in ways that have never been possible. And people are willing to experiment. Verizon and Comcast, companies like these need content for their portals. There is a lot of money involved."


Future development

Barr's real satisfaction comes from seeing something that he envisioned come to life - and in full-color streaming video.

Pat Riley, Miami Heat coach/president, signed up first. Four other teams followed. Several others are testing the service and three recently inquired about it.

"The word is starting to spread," Barr said.

In the next few weeks, SST also will begin logging defensive situations and player tendencies, which will make it even more applicable.

NBA Entertainment is in talks with the company to use the technology for an interactive feature that fans can use if they sign up for NBA.com's "Velvet Ropes" service for the playoffs.

"Everybody in the NBA will have Synergy's service," predicted Donnie Walsh, president and CEO of the Indiana Pacers, one of Barr's clients. "They're way ahead of all their competition."

And this technology evidently is not gathering dust.

"If you played video 24 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop for 2 1/2 months, that's the amount of video our clients have viewed in the last 5 1/2 months," Lahr said. "That's a fairly small set of teams, but their usage is extremely heavy."

And Barr's company also provides in-arena "cache" servers for clients. All SST's logged info goes right to the servers, which will hold a season-and-a-half worth of data and video, allowing people throughout an organization to utilize the service in-house all at the same time without tying up valuable bandwidth.

"Garrick was right," Lahr said. "What we're providing is what NBA teams needed."

The Pacers' Walsh agreed.

"It's exactly what NBA teams want and can use," he said. "From our team's standpoint, we can have everything we want on a team we're playing tomorrow before we even get on a plane after a game tonight.

"From a college scouting standpoint, if we want to draft a guy and we expect him to be able to post up, in minutes you can look at every post-up play he's been involved in and break down what he does when he posts up.

"From an international scouting perspective, it can be a big cost saver. It's really pragmatic."

Griffin, who said the Suns are testing the service, is hoping to sell USA Basketball on Barr's technology to prepare for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

And he believes it might be an even easier sell once NBA front-office types figure out that it can help them as much as their coach.

"A lot of times, guys are going to say, 'I'm not spending $50,000 on that for my coach,' " Griffin said, laughing. " 'But I'll spend $50,000 on me!' "

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/sports/articles/0413sportstech0413.html

The Business of Sports: Here Come the Technocrats

The Business of Sports: Here Come the Technocrats
Wall Street Journal
By Russell Adams | September 16, 2006

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115813109459661786.html

This past spring, the Houston Rockets hired a 33-year-old guy with almost no playing, coaching or scouting experience to be the National Basketball Association team's general manager of the future -- a move that reverberated loudly in the basketball world.

In some corners, the hiring of Daryl Morey, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan School of Management), part-time business professor and former financial consultant, signaled the official arrival in the NBA of the data-oriented approach to running a team chronicled in "Moneyball," Michael Lewis's 2003 best-seller about baseball's Oakland A's. Others saw it as evidence of an owner gone mad.

The Business of Sports

As sports has grown into big business, the teams and leagues have gotten serious about how they find off-field talent. Plus, as any nonathlete who has tried knows, it takes a lot more than desire to get to the top of the sports business.

But at 226 Causeway St. in Boston, where the NBA's Boston Celtics conduct business, the Rockets' move brought validation. It was the Celtics that, three years earlier, had given Mr. Morey, then a financial consultant who had never sniffed an NBA front office, his first job in professional sports.

"It's so much fun trying to do things in a way they haven't been done before," says Wyc Grousbeck, managing partner and governor of the Celtics. "I didn't hire him thinking he was going to become an NBA GM. But why couldn't a junior consultant become an NBA general manager?"

Striving for Efficiency

Since taking over the team in late 2002, the Celtics ownership group has exemplified the challenges of bringing modern business sensibilities to a tradition-bound franchise operating in a world historically averse to change. They've replaced nearly half of the team's employees (some of those through natural attrition), turned the ticket-sales operation into a yield-management business that allows them to use inventory data to maximize revenue, and built a small army of statisticians to unearth valuable information -- on ticket sales and players' performance -- for the front office and coaching staff.

It's a phenomenon playing out throughout sports in recent years: Having spent astronomical sums on their franchises, a new breed of aggressive, tech-savvy owners are demanding greater efficiency in an often pathetically inefficient industry.

But they're not always well-received. The Oakland A's success and "Moneyball" made baseball front offices around the league more open to number-crunching general managers, setting off a turf war between these outsiders and the baseball lifers who view their experience in the game as a requirement for entry. And in the NBA, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's convention-defying approach -- whether it's turning the arena into an all-purpose entertainment venue or exploring new statistical tools for measuring player performance -- is part of what has made him one of the league's most polarizing figures.

The group of venture capitalists and private-equity investors, who in 2002 paid a then-record $360 million for the Celtics, arrived at the beginning of this sea change, but with the added challenge of melding modernity with tradition. By then, the proud franchise of Bob Cousy, Bill Russell and Larry Bird had fallen into a distant third in the Boston sports hierarchy -- behind baseball's Boston Red Sox and the National Football League's New England Patriots. So when Mr. Morey mastered the NBA salary cap in a weekend while doing a valuation analysis for the prospective owners, the group saw someone who could help maximize an underleveraged asset.

"I said, 'Daryl, you're going to look pretty good in green if you get this deal done,' " recalls Mr. Grousbeck.

Modernizing Ticket Sales

As senior vice president of operations and information, Mr. Morey's first job was to modernize the ticket-sales operation. He tapped a Cambridge company called StratBridge Inc. to install technology allowing the sales team to visually analyze, in real time, who the customers are, where they're sitting and what they're willing to pay for tickets. A 40-inch plasma screen on the wall of the sales office shows a map of the TD Banknorth Garden, with each seat rendered a different shade to indicate availability and sales patterns. The 25-person sales team uses that data to study buying trends and develop promotions -- sometimes just hours before the start of the game -- to sell unused seats.

"It's about finding the right seat for the right price for the right person on the right night of the week," says Rich Gotham, the team's chief operating officer. "It's not rocket science."

Since the new system was implemented a year ago, Mr. Gotham says, the team has doubled its group-sales business and remained at the top of the league in individual ticket sales. But he adds that it's not all about the technology; they've significantly increased their sales staff as well.

Scott O'Neil, the NBA's senior vice president of marketing, says 22 of the league's 30 teams have since adopted the same system. "The Celtics are one of the most forward-thinking, innovative and creative teams when it comes to using data and taking the analytical approach to decision making," says Mr.O'Neil.

Evaluating Players

But basketball operations is where this approach might ultimately produce the biggest rewards. Mr. Morey also had long explored basketball analytics and had worked as a consultant at Stats Inc., a company that provides sports statistics and analysis primarily to teams, leagues and media outlets. At Stats, he had developed a way to apply the Pythagorean theorem of baseball - which predicts wins based on runs scored and runs allowed -- to other sports. Mr. Morey offered to do statistical analyses for the Celtics, which gave him the go-ahead to hire a small team of statisticians who would provide input to the basketball operations and coaching staffs.

One of the first big projects was a regression analysis of 25 years of NBA drafts to determine which college statistics best equate with NBA success at each of the five positions. The stats group now is developing a similar database of European players, says Danny Ainge, the Celtics' executive director of basketball operations, as well as an analysis of the composition of NBA championship teams. But Mr. Ainge plays down the utility of statistics for evaluating basketball players, saying it is "dangerous" to assume the numbers can tell you everything.

"I still am in favor of the old-fashioned way of spending time and studying players," says Mr. Ainge, who adds that the statistical information is merely a complement to what the scouts say.

He says that his skepticism is, in part, a function of the newness of this approach, and that data showing which combinations of players perform best together have been helpful to head coach Doc Rivers and his staff.

For his part, Mr. Morey says he takes a balanced approach, and that while he's "obsessive about testing beliefs about what helps a team win using analytics," the foundation of his beliefs come from traditional approaches. "I'm not someone who leads with numbers," he says.

For sure, the team so far has had mixed results producing a winner -- on and off of the court. The Celtics have lost more games than they've won in two of the past three seasons. And over that period, they've never been higher than 18th in the league in attendance. This season might bring more of the same, as the team remains light on stars and loaded with talented but inexperienced players.

Team officials say that in sports, business only booms when the team wins.

The key is squeezing the most out of the asset when demand is low so that you can maximize growth when the team is winning. The model for getting the most out of an asset is just across town, where the Red Sox have squeezed every last penny out of historic Fenway Park. In so doing, the Red Sox have opened themselves to criticism from some baseball fans who see a front office full of bean counters willing to stomp on tradition.

Emotional Investment

The Celtics' new regime has been similarly aggressive on the business side, but team officials say they realized early on that they couldn't operate the team like they operate any other business. Buying a season ticket or a sponsorship, say team officials, is an emotional investment that demands personal attention from the team.

"It's very much an interpersonal industry," says Mr. Gotham, "and you can't just take a quantitative approach. The successful organizations understand that pretty well."

The Mavericks' Mr. Cuban advised these owners early on to let the fan base know that the owners are the team's biggest fans. Mr. Grousbeck is such a staple in the stands and around the team that some of the players have taken to calling him a clone of Mr. Cuban. At least it's not an act.

Mr. Grousbeck is a lifelong fan of the team. And in that, he's far from alone among the ownership group. Stephen Pagliuca, a managing director of Bain Capital, one of the biggest buyout firms in the world, is a Celtics diehard with a basketball court in his house. Robert Epstein, a principal at Boston real-estate company Abbey Group, is a graduate of Mr. Cousy's basketball camp. And James Pallotta, a managing director at Tudor Investments Corp., plays in a regular pick-up game at Harvard University's gym with several former NBA players. Mr. Grousbeck has asked if he could play but was told he's not good enough.

Jeff Sargain's Work in the NBA

Ryan Corazza of the Indiana Daily Student, wrote a feature in February 2006 on Jeff Sargain. Sargain is a mathematician wo studies sports. Since 1985, he has been doing work on NCAA football and basketball. Sargain has also developed rating systems for other sports, including: boys' and girls' Indiana high school basketball, NASCAR, MLB, individual baseball players, men's and women's college golf, and MLS.

An excerpt from the article can be found here:

The story of Winval goes back to spring 2000, when Winston took his son, Gregory, an Indiana Pacers fan, to see the team play in Dallas during spring break. He ran into Cuban, a former student of his in the business school, in the stands and Cuban asked if there was any way Winston could help the team through mathematics. After Winston and Sagarin bounced ideas back and forth, they came up with Winval, short for "winning value."

Sagarin said Winval evaluates players based on the "rows" they play in during a basketball game. A row consists of a time frame a player participates in within a game -- his time on the court in between timeouts, a break at half time, or player substitutions during free throws. Play-by-play data is supplied to Winston and Sagarin by the Elias Sports Bureau."Each one of these rows is a little mini-game," Sagarin said. "A typical NBA game has about 30 rows."

Sagarin said during the first year of Winval, Cuban would be up at 2 or 3 in the morning e-mailing back and forth with him on specific features of the program.

"We've evolved towards a better routine," Sagarin said in regards to the duo's relationship with the Mavericks. "We understand what they want now and what's useful to them. We didn't know that when we started because they're coaches and we're math guys.""Jeff is your typical eccentric genius," Cuban said via e-mail. "He locks himself away for months at a time with no human contact just to come up with great formulas for evaluating sports. It's fun to work with him, and his stuff is amazing."

Currently, Winval rates Lebron James as the best overall player in the league, with Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Tracy McGrady and Andre Iguodala rounding out the top five. Although he ranks first offensively, Kobe Bryant ranks a surprising 27th in the overall category.

"A lot of people think Kobe Bryant is good defensively, but he's really not," Winston said. "When's he's in the game, they give up a lot of points, so that's why he isn't higher.

In addition to providing Cuban and the Mavericks coaching staff with Winval, Winston gives them scouting reports of opposing teams as well as which lineups and player combinations have worked best and worst for the Mavericks during the year. He can easily mix and match player names in Microsoft Excel to see point-margin differentials and ratings when a certain lineup is on the court.

The Seattle Supersonics and Toronto Raptors have both used Sagarin and Winston's services for a short period of time, but Winston says they would rather not help out another Western Conference team because it creates a conflict of interest with the Mavericks. The New Jersey Nets is one Eastern Conference team that has expressed interest in Winval. Winston added that both he and Sagarin would like to help out the IU basketball team, but because Big Ten stat sheets don't supply substitutions, the key ingredient to their system, they are unable to do so.

The article in its entirety can be found by going to:
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=33683

Cuban's Idea to Make Money in Basketball

I read a great blog post that Mark Cuban wrote about an outside-the-box way of making money in basketball.

The post can be found by going to:
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/07/15/making-money-in-basketball/

Young General Managers Coming Up Through the Ranks

"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."

Article available at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38111-2003Nov13?language=printer