Support for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from Hilco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial and the Eller Group specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication EllerGroup.com - I'm Evan Smith.

He's the LeBron James of basketball analytics, a former NBA analyst at ESPN, the former chief analytics consultant for USA Basketball, and the author of a great new book about the game, "Hoop Atlas: Mapping the Remarkable Transformation of the NBA."

He's Kirk Goldsberry.

This is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

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As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauds) Kirk Goldsberry, welcome.

Good to see you.

- It's great to be here, Evan.

Thanks for having me.

- Thank you very much for being here.

I love this book.

- Thanks.

- But I'm trying to understand the difference between this book and your last one.

So you wrote a bestselling book about the NBA, arguably about the modern era of the NBA, as well, called Sprawlball," this was in 2020.

- Yeah.

- Here we are, four years later.

We have another book, surely will be a bestseller, about the modern era of the NBA.

Why did we need another?

- Well, the first book really focused and zeroed in on how the three point shot and analytics sort of converged to update the look and feel of basketball.

And I wouldn't say overlooked the impact of individual players, but in this one, I really wanted to focus almost like a jazz historian would, on how the individual superstars who are extremely influential in our league reshaped basketball with different techniques and approaches and triumphs that ended up changing how we look at greatness in pro hoops.

- Well, and you actually, in fairness, you telegraph that in the name of the book.

The book is called "Hoop Atlas."

And it's this great play on words because an atlas is a collection of maps and there are many maps.

You use mapping to visualize data in this book, to tell the story of the NBA.

We'll come to that in a bit.

But also you're referring to Atlas as in Greek mythology, holding the weight of the heavens on his shoulders.

And the reality is that you say, very clearly in this book, there are certain players in professional basketball who hold the weight of the sport on their shoulders.

- Right, and we start with Michael Jordan.

And ironically, torturing that metaphor, start with a famous shrug in the 1992 finals when he made six threes and shrugged at the camera.

And we call that "Atlas shrugged."

I don't necessarily endorse the ideology there, but it was torturing the Atlas metaphor even further.

But the larger point is, yeah, pro basketball, more than pro football, more than baseball, more than any other sport, really looks at these individual players to show us the next step in the basketball evolution.

And Jordan really modernized the game after Magic.

And Larry had brought it to new heights.

- Of course, I don't want to challenge you on this, because you're an expert and I'm a mere amateur, but, today in baseball, whether it's Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, there are sort of in that sport players who are carrying the weight of the game on their shoulders.

Like we could spend probably 30 minutes talking about this.

- Yeah.

- But I'll stipulate your point, that in basketball, certain people have been elevated, or have elevated the sport themselves in a way that calls them out, deserves being called out.

- Yeah, and they almost deformed the medium.

They reform the medium.

Stephen Curry's another great example, who challenges what greatness looks like.

- Well, and in fact, if you watch the Olympics, I know you did, and I did.

We talked about this after that famous, now I think we'll be infamous last game, the gold medal round, right?

Where they won the gold medal where he hit three after three.

That most impossible of all threes, over two guys, kind of on his back foot, right, in the end.

He is one of one, not one of many.

- And he changed the sport forever.

We're here in Austin, if you go to a playground or a youth basketball game tomorrow, you'll see a bunch of kids shooting threes in a way that when I was young, we weren't doing that.

That's what I'm saying.

These people are very influential.

Charles Barkley famously said, they're not role models, but certainly to young hoopers, they are.

And Stephen Curry, and what a moment, by the way.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Reminding the world that Americans are still here in the greatest sport on earth, basketball.

But doing it with his stylistic innovation, which is just self-created threes in many cases, dribbling into threes, against the best defenders the other team has to offer.

There's nothing you can do to stop it.

And, you know, he won the Serbia game too for us in the semi-finals against Nikola Jokic, who many consider to be the best player on the planet right now.

But again, Stephen is unlike any superstar we've ever had.

And he sort of portends a new kind of jump shooting superstar that we didn't really consider beforehand.

- There's something about him, again, expert, amateur, but I want to just observe, watching that game that occurred to me.

So many of our sports heroes and so many in basketball, their confidence in themselves borders on arrogance, right?

And that's part of their brands.

He seems to be the opposite of that.

He seems like a very humble, I mean, I understand, he did this, I get it.

But he nonetheless seems like not cut from exactly the same cloth as the rest of these guys.

Is that a right read on him?

- Yeah, I think he's very confident.

And when I was with the Spurs in the front office and he would kick our butts, he seemed arrogant to me at those times.

(audience laughs) But, you know, when I got for this book to get a lot of time with Stephen in his private workouts in the off season, the dude is a scientist.

There's nobody works harder than him in the NBA.

- And everything is intentional.

- And it's very scientific work.

Yeah, it's very intentional how he looks at his one-on-one workouts.

And one of the reasons he's so great and so unprecedented is he's taken practice and made it perfect to turn the traditional phrase.

He is so smart, and his trainer, Brandon Payne, who is a great character in this book, helped me understand what it takes to develop an unprecedented 30 foot shot that would sort of challenge basketball.

- So, let's talk about the big takeaways from this book because I think, you know, somebody else reading it might have taken away certain other things, but I was struck by a couple things, so I'm gonna call those out.

First of all, the degree to which the offensive game in basketball is so much more efficient today than it used to be.

- Right.

- Right?

Talk about that.

That seems to be a theme throughout this book.

- Yeah, so a few things happen.

Most important, I would say in 2003, a book called "Moneyball" comes out and really challenges all pro sports to get their stuff together, so to speak.

And really think about how financial reasoning can influence or help us understand performances on the field or on the court.

Obviously, that started in baseball, but then front offices start to care about the word efficiency a lot more than they had.

And really new rubrics emerge to judge players.

- Right.

Metrics change.

- Metrics changed.

And the sort of congruence between statistical efficiency and what we would consider greatness started to align more.

- So the performance of these players that we're seeing has really been engineered.

- Correct, and sometimes by the players themselves.

This is not just like Billy Beane and in some back room, like running numbers.

The players themselves, famously, James Harden, I would argue, really epitomizes becoming super savvy about how my performance filters through these numbers.

- Right, now, let me take a short walk from that and observe as others.

I was talking to a bunch of basketball fans knowing I was gonna come and see you.

And I said, what would you ask Kirk Goldsberry?

And a consistent question I heard back was, people are scoring routinely 50, 60, 70 points in a game.

That didn't use to happen.

- Right.

- Now it's sort of, we kind of go, well.

Speaking of shrugging, we kind of go, oh, they scored 60 or 70 points.

Is that a byproduct of offensive efficiency?

- It's a byproduct of an unending quest for efficiency coaches, players and front offices.

And in the book we talk about a new movement called heliocentrism, which is a new word for an old concept in hoops.

Like when Wilt Chamberlain played, the strategy of his team was "Duck.

Get it to Wilt, and get out of the way."

- Right.

Right.

- That's still the strategy, but we're seeing it from different kinds of players, not old-school post-up bigs like Wilt or Bill Russell or Kareem.

Now it's the Stephen, Donovan, Mitchell, James Harden, Luka Doncic, just using possession after possession.

And just racking up crazy totals.

Not because they're better than Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, but because they're taking more shots and using more possessions than those guys.

- It's also the case, I think, and you tell me if this is right, that there are not really teams with one player and four stiffs on the court anymore.

- Right.

- There are a lot more teams that have a number of people you could pass the ball to with confidence are gonna score.

- Oh yeah.

So that's another great point, Evan.

Like, the NBA is generally 500 people at any given time, and that group of 500 has never been so skilled and never been so talented, particularly on offense, and even more specifically, shooting the ball.

And so offenses are spread out and everybody's threatening.

Like, the coaches are chess masters now.

And every team decorates the court with dangerous threats that make some of the stars' jobs even easier 'cause defenses have never been this thinned out.

- Right, so on the question of offense, a second takeaway that I got from this book was the dominance of the corner three, as not just any three, but the corner three specifically, as a component of the modern game.

And again, if you watch the Olympics, you saw this.

I'm amazed at how often you see a shooter in the corner put up a three and you think yourself, that's gonna go in, right?

And again, maybe I'm wrong about this, but that didn't used to seem to be the case, right?

- No.

So Bruce Bowen in San Antonio about 20 years ago, really started to define this new archetype of a player, a 3-and-D player.

And Gregg Popovich recognized that by stationing this guy in the corner, Tim Duncan got harassed less on the other side of the court when he was posting on.

And so what happened is everybody followed suit.

It's a copycat league.

But the corner three, I would argue, is the most sort of prototypical element of the analytics revolution in any sport.

- How's that?

- Because it's called the smartest shot in basketball.

It's certainly associated with the "Moneyball" movement.

And when you look at the math, it is more efficient than layups for a lot of players in the NBA.

- So it's not harder to hit a corner three than it is to hit a three from the center of the three point line?

- So it is harder for some of us, but what happens is.

- Some of us, yes.

I will stipulate it would be harder for me.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Right.

But I mean, I'm just looking at the angle of it and I'm thinking there's a whole bunch of things that could go wrong there.

- Yeah, so a lot of people are like, oh, that shot's a little bit shorter, that's why it's so efficient.

That's kind of true.

But what's really happening, Evan, is teams are putting better and better shooters over there and they're designing offensive sets so that those shots, when they happen, are almost always ideal catch and shoot.

The guy's got his feet set and he's got a clean look and there's nobody there.

So a lot of the shots above the break are polluted by unassisted attempts and all this technicalities, but ultimately, it's good shooters taking clean shots in a great spot.

- So again, taking a short walk from this, are colleges and high schools seeing the emergence of the corner three as not something that you add to the menu, but it's a staple of the menu of skills and therefore we're beginning to see that become more of a feature of the college game and of the high school game?

- A hundred percent.

And it's a great example of the sort of trickle down, sort of stylistic economics that the Currys and the Bowens and the Popovich's do.

That you influence the game at the top, eventually.

- Well, if you want to get into the NBA as a college player, you better have a quarter three.

- A hundred percent.

- Now, and again, some number of years ago that might not have been the case.

- Yeah, and we talk about some guys who were already in the NBA and have become a lot wealthier or extended their careers, guys like Al Horford or Brook Lopez, who were not shooting threes in college, but as they entered their prime and post-prime have extended their careers and become NBA champions with that exact shot.

- They had to backfill it.

- They had to backfill it.

Exactly.

- Okay, so you mentioned Jokic.

I mean, I am a Spurs fan.

My house is a house full of Spurs fans, right.

I'll acknowledge that, cop to that.

You know, we are Team Wemby.

- Yes.

- All day long, twice on Sunday, we are Team Wemby.

It pained me to see Wemby playing for a team other than team USA, because Wemby is an international player who's come to play here.

And there are many of those, Jokic.

I mean, there's plenty of, in fact, that's a, again, a third takeaway from this book is the extent to which the international players are having an influence as never before on the game.

- Yes.

When I fell in love with basketball, basketball was not, obviously, the second most popular sport in the world.

Now, it clearly is.

And it's not close.

We're not catching soccer anytime soon.

But Wemby, the French teams that we saw at the Olympics, on both the men's and women's side provide evidence.

- God, they were both great, weren't they?

- Yeah.

- We could've easily lost.

- Yeah.

We needed Stephen Curry to do that.

But we're seeing two consecutive French players go number one in the NBA draft.

An American player hasn't won the MVP in the 2020s yet.

We've given five straight to international players.

This is the world's game now, which is great, as a fan.

It's a great thing for Olympics, but it also means we're getting cool techniques and cool kind of personnel from overseas.

And one of the things the Europeans have really given us, and Wemby is probably the best example of, it's not Jokic, is the hyper skilled big man who can dribble past and shoot.

Oh, by the way, he's still seven feet tall and can rebound and block the shot.

- He's enormously not clumsy for a guy that big, I don't know how else to say it.

- He's very graceful and fluid in his movements.

- And he can do many things.

Well, see, and that's the fourth point that I took away from this book, that the role of the center has been redefined to some degree.

And I wanted to confirm my view in my head.

Well, Wemby is a center.

Well, but he also doesn't only, I mean, he can do a lot of things, right?

- So the traditional sort of five man taxonomy of basketball is sort of an extinct idea.

- Right.

It's an outmoded way to think about it.

- It really is.

And the centers were kind of being left for dead with the Golden State Warriors.

Draymond Green it was about six, six was their center.

Small ball's here to stay until, it wasn't.

Until Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic.

And Victor Wembanyama showed up and we're like, what if we just learned how to dribble, pass and shoot too?

And it turns out being bigger in this sport still helps.

- Even if you're doing that.

- Even if you're doing, especially if you're doing that.

Joel Embiid's shot's unblockable.

Victor Wembanyama's shots are unblockable, but he can certainly block the other people's shots on the other side of the court.

So once, and again, this came from overseas.

David Stern's vision in the '90s to globalize the game helped set in motion like this sort of melting pot.

And one of the reasons we're seeing this giant resurrection of big guys in the league is these European youth leagues are teaching all of their players to be more skilled.

Even the big guys, dribble, pass and shoot.

- Is the change that you're talking about top down or bottom up?

Bottom up, in the sense that it's happening at the player level on the team level, and the league has been transformed as a result?

Or speaking of intentionality, there's an intentionality on the part of the NBA to have the league be transformed.

So whether it's David Stern or Adam Silver or whomever, the people in charge of the league are saying, we can't do the same thing over and over.

We've gotta figure out a new way to think about this.

- You know, that's a great question.

I'm gonna give all the credit to the players.

I think it's individual players that challenge the medium and have proven, and I always say it's not a peaceful transition of power from one stylistic regime to the next.

Like, Michael had to go through the Pistons.

It was bloody.

And at the other side, we got a much more beautiful version of basketball, and he inspired Kobe.

And Kobe inspires all these other players we're talking about today.

So I will give full credit to basketball players developing techniques.

Whether it's Manu, your beloved Spurs with a Euro step.

That wasn't David Stern's idea.

His idea was to get a kid in Argentina to play basketball, which is great.

- Full stop.

Yeah.

- But I don't think he foresaw the Euro step or the European big quite like that.

- Yeah.

You mentioned Kobe and particularly Michael Jordan, you know, in politics sometimes you say, that person who routinely won elections 25 years ago couldn't get through a primary today the way the world changes.

Could Michael Jordan get through a primary today?

- Oh, hell yeah.

- Could Kobe get through a primary today?

Yes?

- Yeah, because their defining characteristic wasn't their actual skillset that we saw manifest.

It was their in between the ears stuff.

These guys were the most competitive people.

And they were blessed physically.

- Even though the game has changed, they would still be great today, Kobe would still be great today?

- A hundred percent.

I always push back on that idea that these guys couldn't play with these guys, or vice versa, by the way.

I think like Stephen Curry would've made it work.

- 25 or 30 years ago would've been great.

- Yeah.

They could've thrived at any time.

- All right, and I'm gonna put you on the spot.

Who is the best player in the NBA right now?

- Nikola Jokic.

It's not even close.

- You didn't even hesitate.

- He's won three of the last four MVPs.

He almost beat Team USA in the semi-finals of the Olympic tournament with not a lot of help out there.

He is statistically, aesthetically just so far ahead of the second guy.

- So if you could draft anybody off of any team for a new team, he'd be the one.

- It's either him or Wembanyama, depending on how long into the future.

- Isn't amazing that Wemby after just a short time in the league is already on your list of the top two.

- He was as hyped as anybody since LeBron James and he's over, I think, achieved what that hype, so far.

- Can he get the Spurs to a championship and to win, do you think?

- A hundred percent.

- Do they have enough other people?

I mean, you know the Spurs, you were in fact on the Spurs staff, you were vice president at the Spurs, right, for a couple of years.

- Right.

- You know that team very well.

You know, Pop very well.

Is that team ready to be there?

And is he the reason that they'll get there?

- He's the reason they're gonna get there.

I think they're, as my friend friend Fran Fraschilla would say they're two years away from being two years away.

I think they're on path, they're on the trajectory.

They are making the baby steps and the steps in this case are very long strides by their French center.

But I think they're going to be, if I had to bet if they're gonna win a championship in the 2030s with Wembanyama, I would bet, yes.

This organization is ready.

- Which two teams are in the finals this year?

- This year, the Boston Celtics are not only the best team in the league, but they have an easier path out of the East.

So we'll start with the Celtics.

The West is much, much harder.

You have Oklahoma City, you have Denver.

I'll say Oklahoma City.

They're an ascendant young team that is as deep as it gets in the West.

But the West is the hardest one to pick.

The Celtics have a much more likely path.

- Okay.

So this is on TV, you know, right?

So we have video of you saying Boston and Oklahoma City.

- That's right.

- We'll come back at the end of the season.

If you're wrong, we'll dunk on you.

See what I did there?

- I like that.

- You like that?

Okay.

So I've alluded a couple times to the maps and the data and the charts and the way that you visualize statistics and data.

And it's so additive to your presentation of your theories and thesis in this book.

That is in fact your background.

- Yes, that's right.

- You did not start out as a sports guy.

You went to Penn State, grew up in State College, Pennsylvania.

You went to Penn State, and the first job you had out, or one of the first jobs you had out was as a cartographer for FEMA.

- That's right.

- Right.

You're a map guy.

- Yes.

I'm a map.

I'm a cartographer.

I got a PhD in geography, studying cartography and visualization.

- Taught that in college.

You taught at Michigan State.

- Yes.

I taught at Michigan State.

- Taught at Harvard.

And you taught that stuff.

Not this stuff.

- No, but it is, yeah.

The only reason that people let me talk about basketball is because I started visualizing shooting data in the same way that I'd been making thematic maps of things like floodplains or public health data and teaching students for that.

And it's all spatial data, Evan.

The science of where, you know, knows no bounds.

- But obviously, you cared a lot about basketball.

- I love basketball.

- You played?

- Oh, of course.

Yeah, I still play.

It's the best.

- I know you're sitting, but you're tall.

- Yeah, I'm tall.

- And you are a gym rat?

- I love it.

Yeah.

And I started having the ideas for my shot charts when I realized I was much better at shooting from one side of the court than the other.

- Interesting.

That drove this whole thing.

- And I knew there was this spatial component to all of my favorite players' greatness too.

I knew that Kobe liked these spots, but Dirk liked that spot.

And then Timmy liked the left block and bank it in.

And I wanted to see that.

And so the genesis of my career in basketball was trying to reveal these idiosyncrasies that are at the heart of shooting performances.

And nobody in the discourse was doing that.

And I saw an opportunity to do it with my training.

So mapping players, especially their scoring was my entry.

- Were you a good player?

- No, of course not.

- Right, so the the old adage, those who can't teach.

- Yeah, those who can't teach or do stats.

- That works out.

So you're now running the business of Sports Institute at the University of Texas.

And you teach at the McCombs School of Business a class on sports analytics.

- Correct.

- So, someone who loves this conversation or loves this book and wants to go through an entire semester of conversations like this, has the opportunity to sit in Professor Goldsberry, Doctor, PhD, Dr. Goldsberry's class and talk about this stuff.

- It's great for me to be back in a university setting.

I spent my entire twenties wasting away getting a PhD and I'm using it again here at the University of Texas in Austin.

But in all seriousness, like I want to give back and I want to help students who want careers in sports have a pathway.

I know that your own son is very interested in sports and in basketball.

And one of the things that these students encounter is how do I do that?

There's no law school.

There's no business school for sports, there's no.

- Well, you can't get a PhD in basketball, right?

- Not yet.

But it's like, it's more valuable than a PhD in a lot of fields.

- But I want to come back to "Moneyball."

You know, I actually dogeared in my reading of this book, the chapter that referred to Michael Lewis's famous book, which became a famous movie, you know, with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill that I've seen many, many times because it really does change my thinking about, it changed everyone's thinking I think about that game.

And the reality is there is a discipline here, right?

It's not a one-off thing.

You're not the only one who can do, I mean, theoretically, you can create a whole bunch of Kirk Goldsberrys as a consequence of this focus.

- Yeah, "Moneyball" to me isn't about finding a better batting order for the Oakland A's.

It's more deep than that.

It's about the irreversible infiltration of financial thinking and business school thinking into sports reasoning.

and you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

- Applying a different set of frames.

- It was a smarter way to frame the endeavor of building pro sports teams, period.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- And it's the best sports book, probably ever written, at least in the 21st century.

It's a masterpiece.

And one of the few books that we can point to and say that book started a movement that changed something really significant in American culture.

- And as movies about sports go, to be honest with you, it's very accessible for the average person.

- We watch it in my class.

It's a very seminal moment.

It captures this really interesting intersection of tech, business and sports that could have only happened in the early 2000s.

- So we just got a couple minutes left.

You know I care about journalism and I know you do, as well.

I want to ask you about sports journalism, the state of sports journalism.

You had logged time at ESPN and also at the late lamented, dear departed Grantland, right, which a lot of people who care about sports journalism think was like this great thing and we're sorry not to have it with us anymore.

What has happened to this?

What has happened to sports journalism?

I mean, it feels like everything is just less than it used to be.

- Yeah, I think social media happens.

- I mean, Sports Illustrated may as well be dead.

Pour one out for Sports Illustrated, right?

- Sports Illustrated has had a hard time.

Grantland, which was very good in the 2010s is gone.

You know, The Ringer's doing a very good job.

The Athletic is doing a good job.

But it's not as fun as it used to be for a lot of us.

- Why is that?

- I think the social media sort of toxicity has affected it.

I think the algorithm has challenged people to be more extreme versions of themselves.

And for those of us who are like analytical and nuanced, that's not as popular.

- Not my thing, right.

- Yeah, not on TikTok, at least.

So that I think is the biggest thing is social media.

But ultimately a lot of my friends in the business have had a hard time landing jobs or staying with jobs because it's just the rug is pulled out from you every few years in one way or another.

- I wonder if like politics where the people we used to cover as journalists have figured out that they no longer need us to get their message out.

They can create their own channels.

If that's also happened to some degree as individuals and teams figure out they can avoid the media asking hard questions and they can just get their content out to people directly.

- Oh, a hundred percent.

JJ Reddick, Draymond Green, there's no shortage of NBA players.

The Kelce brothers just signed a hundred million dollar deal.

And I think athletes taking charge of the narrative is a great development.

But in a zero sum game, I think there's some consequences to that too.

There's only so much to go around.

And as these voices get a larger and larger share, whether that's better or worse, there's just only so many jobs for those of us in sports journalism.

- Well, at least we have you.

- Well, I'll still do it.

- Listen, I love this book.

And I think you're such a smart guy and you make this stuff come alive in ways that nobody else does.

So I want to wish you great success with this.

I know it'll be a big hit.

Everybody, give Kirk Goldsberry a big hand.

- Thank you, guys.

- [Evan] Thank you very much.

- Appreciate you.

- Appreciate you being here.

- Thank you.

- [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&A's with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- I do think somebody will score a hundred points, in part because of this heliocentric trend.

We're seeing seventies, eighties.

And we're seeing faster games and we're seeing defenses just stretched to the limit.

As more and more people can shoot the three point shot further and further out, that's gonna be the reason that I think somebody's gonna do that in the next 20 years.

Support for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from Hilco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial and the Eller Group specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication EllerGroup.com (soft music)