NBA Notebook: A Celtics' scouting secret on Jayson Tatum revealed and other lessons learned at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

BOSTON -- The Celtics were front and center at the 14th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this weekend, with several members of the organization appearing across the 36 panels including co-owners Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca, team president Rich Gotham, assistant general manager Mike Zarren and players Jaylen Brown and Enes Kanter. With over 3,000 attendees from 160+ pro sports teams and colleges, there were lots of in-depth discussions across sports and business topics using the theme: Run The Numbers: How that process empowers team and organizations to generate meaningful insights, navigate uncertainty and compete effectively.

Amid two days of panels across the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, a look a few of the more meaningful things we learned while providing a glimpse of what lies ahead of the basketball world.

1. The Celtics’ injury intel on Jayson Tatum gave them a valuable secret before the 2017 NBA Draft: Mike Zarren was part of a very informative Basketball Analytics panel alongside ESPN’s Zach Lowe, former C’s coach Tom Thibodeau and Mavs analyst Haralabob Voulgaris and pulled back the curtain a bit at the C’s evaluation process of Jayson Tatum ahead of the 2017 NBA Draft. The Celtics ultimately traded down to No. 3 overall from No. 1 to select the Duke freshman who was considered a top-5 prospect by most at the time. The C’s ability to recognize Tatum as a top talent came largely thanks to intel about his physical situation during his freshman year.

"One thing that is interesting that happened with Jayson was that he got hurt early during the season,” Zarren explained. “He broke a bone in his foot. We knew a lot about that injury and he wasn't the same player really that he maybe had been in preseason workouts until just before the ACC Tournament. You get to know people at teams and we sort of had an understanding that Jayson's foot wasn't right for a decent portion of that year so I don't think our real evaluation of him didn't start until much later in the season than you might have been able to glean if you took his college box score stats and looked at them because he was playing on a foot -- he was fine but he wasn't back to 100 percent.

“Seeing the way he dominated in that ACC Tournament, you could do it statistically or by the eye -- he was the best prospect there. That meant a lot to us, much more than we might have placed weight on had he been healthy the entire season.”

Tatum averaged over 20 ppg while leading Duke to a Conference Title win that week in 2017 with Tatum shooting nearly 55 percent from the field during that span. Duke ultimately bowed out in the second round of the NCAA Tournament but he continued to put to bed questions about how his game would translate to the NBA in draft workouts for Boston, particularly when it came to his iffy 3-point shot (34 percent) in college.

“We went to watch Jayson workout at San Bernard's high school by LAX Airport and one of our questions about him was that he didn't take a lot of 3s in college,” Zarren said. “There was a question about how long it took him to get the shot off. That was also an interesting question. He just crushed it shooting in two consecutive workouts for us. That sort of assuages some doubts because there wasn't much of a sample size during his college season.”

Less than three years later, Tatum is already in the mix as an All-NBA candidate and comes with the added benefit of Romeo Langford as the Celtics picked up an extra first-round pick from Sacramento to move back to take him. For all the emphasis on numbers and analytics across the league, the Celtics’ work building relationship with individuals around teams to achieve superior intel appeared to be just as important as any data collected on this front.

2. One NBA owner wants to push the NBA schedule back by two months: The NBA regular season begins right in the heart of the NFL regular season and Hawks CEO Steve Koonin wants to avoid the NBA competing with the ratings monster that is the NFL. Speaking at a panel on Friday about possible changes to the NBA’s schedule, Koonin spoke about his proposal to shift the start of the regular season to Christmas to avoid both college and pro football. The NBA Finals would move back to August from June with the draft and free agency taking place after that in the fall, isolating the NBA season to go head-to-head against baseball primarily rather than football for a big chunk of the calendar, which could help NBA ratings and exposure.

"A big piece is you don't have to reinvent the wheel to enhance ratings," Koonin said. "Sometimes, moving away from the competition is a great way to grow ratings.

"If King Kong is at your door, you might go out the back door, rather than go out the front and engage in a hand-to-hand fight with King Kong. Many times, at the start of the NBA season, we are competing with arguably the best Thursday Night Football game with the NBA on TNT, our marquee broadcast, and we get crushed and we wonder why. It's because at the beginning of the season, there's very little relevance for the NBA. The relevance is now. That's when people are talking about it…"Let football have its time. Let's have our time, and let's go after it."

Evan Wasch, the NBA’s senior VP of strategy and analytics was also on the panel and acknowledged the league was open to an adjustment if all sides involved bought in.

"We certainly have no issue with reconsidering the calendar," Wasch said. "To Steve's point, you have to think about the other stakeholders. They need to get more comfortable with the Finals in August, rather than June, where traditionally the household viewership is a lot lower. But the flip side of that argument is there hasn't been a lot of premium content in that window, which explains why viewership is lower. We're open to that ... there's no magic to [the season going from] October to June."

How the NBA ratings respond after a down year this season may play a big part in this moving forward as key injuries to stars like Stephen Curry and Zion Williamson for a big chunk of the year left some unappealing matchups on national TV over the past few months. However, this is an alignment that could gain steam although it would bury a key part of the NBA calendar (draft and free agency) right at the start of the NFL season. That might be less of a concern for the league though considering those events are not tied as much to TV windows likes games are.

3. Measuring defense with data points remains a mystery: There are plenty of defensive metrics out there to the public for basketball players and team but none remains very valuable to teams as an evaluation tool. Zarren specifically noted how defensive rating is not a good measuring tool for individual defense, while Lowe noted the importance of scouting in evaluating individual defense even in 2020.

"There's still not a stat for individual defense that I trust more than my eyes,” Lowe said. “All of the smart teams, two of which are here, they have super sophisticated internal systems that are not public and have those sort of catch-all (defensive) numbers. Those would probably come the closest to trusting, but if there is a conflict, I still default to the eye test. You have to take everything into account but I don't think there is a catch-all defensive stat.”

Voulgaris agreed with that assessment by noting how certain player’s defensive stats can be managed situationally by coaching staffs (i.e. if a player is put into a challenging situation or not). The metrics don’t account for that type of management which is why finding a good system to measure defensive ability remains a challenge in the NBA world.

Other odds and ends

—Zarren and the Celtics are very-high on in-person college scouting still since it allows them to watch a college player interact with people on the team and allows you to watch the shots they talk during warmups (far more than you would see during the game. Gathering intel from team personnel also is important.

—At this point of the year, the Celtics are focused on college scouting and preparing for the postseason including charting out the number of minutes for players and how to optimize training load. The debate on how best to ramp up a player’s stamina for the postseason was a constant theme since it remains unclear whether more rest or ramping up a player’s minutes strategically so they are at peak form for the postseason is a constant challenge.

—Zarren does not want to tinker with the game much in its current state as he is against a midseason tournament, shortening the season, changing the 3-point line or evening lottery odds.