For a whole day, Leon locked himself in his room, and at lunch, he called the front desk to deliver food, and after eating, he lay on the bed and took a nap to recover the physical strength consumed by staying up late last night.

Then he got busy again, evaluating all the rookies according to his criteria.

He carefully read the stats of each rookie, hoping to find something helpful from them.

It made Leon feel like he was going back to the old days of being an actuary tinkering with numbers, but no matter how much he tried to fiddle with them, he couldn't form a clear evaluation of them in his head.

The simple reason is that the data is so rudimentary.

"Points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, turnovers...... Some look good, some are average, but the scouting report says the opposite, and it doesn't look like the stats tell the whole story. However, it's not that the data itself is a problem, it's that there isn't enough data here, it's not comprehensive enough, it's not objective enough......," Leon thought to himself.

Different rookies come from different teams, have different coaches and teammates, and have different games and opponents, and the same stats can reflect completely different levels of player quality.

Leon wasn't proficient in basketball, but he was good at numbers, and he knew that when a set of data describes something that contradicts a person's sensory intuition, in a few cases it is because the person's intuition is unreliable, and in many cases it is because the data is incomplete.

Obviously, the report that only lists the basic data of the rookies is far from satisfying Leon's needs, Leon's purpose is clear, since he still lacks a perceptual understanding of basketball in terms of experience and intuition, then use these cold data to lay an objective and solid foundation for himself.

Thinking of this, Leon called Wesland and asked him if he had more comprehensive data.

"Comprehensive data? How comprehensive? Wesland asked on the phone, as the Celtics' technical director, his main task this year is to build a player database for the Celtics, and rookies who have never entered the league and veterans who are about to retire are all within the scope of Wesland's collection.

"Every rookie's stats for every game in college, all." Leon emphasized.

"All...... Well, I do have data on almost every rookie playing in college here, but it hasn't been sorted out yet, so if you want to see it, I can send it to you. ”

Wesland didn't know what Leon was trying to do, so he hung up the phone and went to Leon's room with his laptop and a CD.

As soon as he entered the room, Westland saw stacks of player information on the bed, as well as a lot of manuscript paper, on which Leon wrote many formulas.

"What are you writing on paper?" Wesland looked at these formulas and felt that his head was big, although he majored in computer science at the University of Colorado and had a good foundation in mathematics, it was obvious that the formulas that Leon wrote on paper were not the direction he was studying.

"It's just some simple statistical formulas, and your boss didn't even configure a computer for me, but fortunately, I'm quite used to calculating with a pen, which makes me closer to the essence of numbers." Leon bit the pencil in his mouth and said, it was the pencil placed on the bedside message board, which had been written by him bald.

"Alright, hand me over the information I want." Leon continued.

Wesland pulled out the CD, and Leon saw the round guy and really wanted to say "long time no see", and then Wesland plugged him into his laptop, which contained several Excel files, each with data records from every game played by a dozen players in college.

Leon opened the files one by one, looked at the detailed data inside, and couldn't help asking, "How did you do that?" Every data of every person is recorded, and it is literally a world. ”

Hearing Leon's words, Wesland raised an eyebrow and said proudly: "Every university records the performance of their players, and I always spend a lot of effort to get the data recorded on paper, and then classify it and put it in a table. I don't know what they're using now, but I think they'll work someday. ”

"No, not someday, but today." Leon said firmly.

……………………

While Leon was in his room wallowing over a pile of data, Pitino was chatting and laughing with Chicago Tribune reporter KC Johnson in the café across the street from the Athletics Association Hotel.

KC Johnson is still an unknown reporter in Chicago's basketball journalism, but he will be a pillar of Chicago's basketball journalism in the future.

This year, after an unsuccessful transition to an NHL reporter, he returned to basketball journalism, and in his first year from scratch, he cherished every opportunity to get the news.

So, even though Rick Pitino is no longer a sour carrot that not many reporters want to talk about, Johnson still thinks he can get some unusual information from the controversial and criticized Celtics coach.

Because KC-Johnson is not interested in Pitino, but in the Boston Celtics, a reporter with a keen sense of smell who can smell the rain coming from the Celtics.

In the interview, Johnson has always consciously or unconsciously guided the topic in the direction of Celtic's internal construction and management changes, hoping to get some news from Pitino's mouth, especially the important development of Auerbach's imminent return to management.

Pitino, on the other hand, played Tai Chi and often brushed aside the problems of the management, leaving no trace. Immediately after that, the conversation changed and brought the topic back to the draft.

However, KC Johnson is really not interested in this year's draft, and the outside world generally believes that this is a draft year, and there are no super rookies worth paying attention to.

The two of them talked like this, each bragging for more than two hours, and in the end Pitino didn't have any thoughts, although he pinned his hopes on this interview to disrupt the draft market, but if you think about it carefully, this rookie really has no chew, and instantly lost the mood to continue to pretend to be a ghost.

Towards the end of the interview, Pitino suddenly said to Johnson: "The main change in the team at the moment is that after the loss of Bennett, we have a new scout. ”

"Scouts? Who? Johnson felt an opportunity for Pitino's reluctance and immediately asked, hoping to hear the name of a remarkable person.

"You won't recognize it. His name is Fox Leon, a ...... Great, a scout for the team that Auerbach recommended, I think he's going to play a key role in the Celtics' draft. Pitino said solemnly.

For scouting, Johnson is not interested, fans will always only focus on stars, coaches and excellent managers, scouting or something, let them silently discover new stars.

Johnson is interested in the phrase "Auerbach recommendation", which means that Auerbach has begun to re-intervene in Celtic management, and second, it shows that the scout has some background and was able to get Auerbach's recommendation.

However, the name Fox Leon, Johnson really has never heard of, and he never remembers such a number one person in the basketball circle.

Johnson wanted to know more information, but Pitino said goodbye to him and ended the interview, but before leaving, Pitino added: "You can interview him tomorrow in the rookie camp, I think he's really good and there will be a lot of amazing opinions." ”

……………………

Long before entering the NBA, as an avid basketball fan, Wesland realized that there were geniuses in this world; After coming to the NBA, he confirmed this idea even more, and it is full of sports geniuses.

But this time, in room 4016 of the Athletics Association Hotel, he realized that in NBA circles, there might be one more math wizard.

"I've calculated that whether it's points, rebounds, steals, blocks, or assists, there is a significant correlation with a team's wins or losses, and whether it's a t-test or an independent sample t-test, or a correlation analysis, it supports this idea. Then, if you look at the impact of each player's scores, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals on the team's winnings and losses, I used a stepwise regression analysis to see that different players, in different ways, contribute differently to the victory. After that, I tried to sift through all the data using a major cause analysis to find out what each player contributed the most to the team. In this way, I can see where the outstanding value of each player lies. From here I can see that the empirical analysis of some scouting reports, such as Michael Reed, may not be reliable...... Of course, I'm not sure...... And the data is still not rich enough, I think we need not only their data, but also the data of teammates and opponents. Also, the classification of the data is not enough, and the description of the player's performance by purely technical statistics is not perfect, so I think the dimension of description needs to be increased. Leon held in his hand the conclusions he had gained from an afternoon's work, and gave Wesland the general contents of it.

Leon seemed excited, and since he traveled to this plane, he had been calm, even cold. But when he came into contact with the numbers, the pieces of data, like the body fragrance on a woman's body, constantly stimulated Leon.

At the same time, it also irritates Weasland.

Wesland wasn't all about statistics, and he understood many of the concepts Leon said, but the problem was that the data was usually calculated directly by a computer, and he had never seen a guy scribble on scratch paper with a pen and calculate the results of these complex, decimal places to the last four places.

Leon was the first person he had ever seen, using a pen to open roots and make logarithms.

As for the variables that can be solved by the four operations such as the mean, the sum or the variance, Leon looks at it for a while and writes the results directly on the paper.

"Are you the little prince of mathematics?" Wesland stared at Leon for a long moment, then finally asked.

Leon just shook his head, still staring at the pile of numbers, and said: "No, I just have special talents in observation and calculation ability, so-so in logical thinking, and in terms of abstract thinking and construction skills that mathematics needs most, I am only at the level of a junior high school student compared to a real mathematical genius." Therefore, I am better at statistics and technical operations, and I am not a little prince of mathematics...... I think that in terms of scoring, we need to split and refine, and we must add the total score of the whole team, the opponent's score for weighting, and ......"

With that, Leon entered his digital world again, but Wesland had a vague feeling that this guy might bring something different to the basketball world.