In late April, Kings General Manager Vlade Divac hired Luke Bornn as Vice President of Strategy and Analytics. Bornn comes to Sacramento after most recently serving as Head of Analytics for A.S. Roma of the Italian Serie A Football League. He has also held professorships in the Statistics departments at Harvard University and Simon Fraser University.
Bornn is a well-known expert in sports analytics, having been a mainstay at the renowned MIT Sloan Analytics Conference. He has authored numerous papers covering the NBA and is frequently referenced by the media as an analytics expert.
In his role with the Kings, Bornn will use data engineering and collection alongside machine learning techniques to advise basketball operations staff and provide valuable insights on roster compilation, player evaluation and overall strategy.
Kings.com had a chance to speak with Bornn on his new role and how he will help Sacramento basketball.
How excited were you about joining the Kings?
“Super excited. I think the team is really promising and young. The front office with Vlade [Divac], Ken [Catanella], Mike [Bratz], Peja [Stojakovic], and Scott [Perry] – it’s a lot of forward looking individuals focused on winning and turning this franchise around. I’m really excited to be a part of that.”
What is the primary difference, if any, from going from basketball to soccer, and back to basketball?
“First there’s the logistical differences of being in Rome, learning Italian, and working alongside very traditional Italian soccer culture. In contrast, basketball tends to have more use of data and technology, and as a sport is much more evolved in its use of analytics.”
"Since joining the Kings, I’m often asked ‘Coming from soccer, what can you do in basketball?’ Interestingly, it’s the same question I got when I went to Roma, with people asking me ‘Coming from basketball, what can you do in soccer?’, as the bulk of my research and work before joining Roma was in basketball."
"When people talk about applying statistical methods to sports, they tend to tie together basketball and hockey and soccer, and that’s for good reason. These sports have a lot of similarities in the way people move, coordinated offensive and defensive actions, and so on. As a result, there’s a lot of carryover of ideas and techniques, but at the same time, there is of course a lot of unique challenges in each sport as well. For instance, the amount of data in basketball is much, much bigger, purely because of the technology that has been implemented — player tracking data, for example.”
What do you believe is the most important data you can provide to a GM?
“I don’t think there’s any one magic number for player evaluation or strategy or scouting -- it really is context-specific."
"So, what you look at for an off-the-bench shooting guard is very different than what you might look at for a starting center. It’s about knowing the right suite of metrics that help you understand a player’s full game. There are metrics which try to capture a players’ overall performance in a single number, but if you really want to understand how a player is going to fit within your team, you must go beyond these one-size-fits-all metrics and dig in to the characteristics of each player’s playing style and how they’re going to contribute on the court.”
What do you feel is your biggest opportunity to contribute to the team?
“Ultimately my role, and that of analytics more broadly, is to help the team make better, more objective decisions. Vlade, Ken and others in the front office have done a great job with planning and decision-making this past year, and my role will be to continue to expand and improve upon that. It’s all about getting all the information we have into a single, easily accessible place, and then making sure our decisions are driven by that information.
What is your ultimate goal for the analytics department and for the team in general?
“It’s Vlade who’s driving the direction of this team, and I love the way he envisions it. It’s a team that’s very unselfish, a team that’s moving the ball, a team that’s creating opportunities for one another."
"To align with that vision, I’m currently working towards setting up an analytics team and infrastructure so that there are processes and systematic decision-making tools in place that will be used for years and years down the road. We want these tools to help us make decisions that align with the team’s strategic vision, so that we are doings things that achieve those objectives not just this year, but for years into the future.”