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Kings Name Luke Bornn Vice President of Strategy and Analytics

SACRAMENTO, CA - The Sacramento Kings today announced the hiring of Luke Bornn as Vice President of Strategy and Analytics.

Bornn joins the Kings organization after most recently serving as Head of Analytics for A.S. Roma of the Italian Serie A Football League, where he worked closely with managers, coaches and sports scientists to measure and evaluate athletes and performance. Concurrent with his tenure at Roma, the British Columbia native has served as a visiting scholar and professor at Harvard University in the Department of Statistics.

In his new role with Sacramento, Bornn will report directly to General Manager Vlade Divac and employ expertise in data engineering and collection to empower basketball operations personnel with relevant information valuable in decision making processes regarding roster compilation, player evaluation and overall strategy. The material gleaned from Bornn’s data infrastructure will also assist the team’s training staff in analyzing information received via wearable technology. 

Over the coming weeks, Bornn will work with Divac and the front office to add some of the sharpest minds in the field of statistical sciences to augment the analytics department and continue building a database accessible to players, coaches and basketball operations personnel. 

In addition to his academic acumen and professorships at Harvard and Simon Fraser University, Bornn is a frequent contributor to the field of sports analytics, authoring articles for the Journal for Quantitative Analysis, the Annals of Applied Statistics and the Journal of the American Statistical Association—providing insights on basketball related topics such as NCAA Tournament forecasting, predicting possession outcomes in NBA contests and the spatial anatomy of defensive success.

Bornn is also a fixture at the renowned MIT Sloan Analytics Conference, co-authoring six papers since 2014 covering a range of NBA disciplines such as mapping strategies, defensive metrics, ball movement and point predictions and real-time decision making utilizing optical tracking data. His work has been featured by Grantland.com, ESPN the Magazine, Bleacher Report, NBA.com, the Boston Globe and many others.