On June 6, at 6 p.m. Western time, the 2000-2001 NBA Finals season officially began at the Staples Center, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, and their opponent will be the former rival Philadelphia 76ers.

Three of the first four Finals in the 1980s were matchups between the 76ers and the Lakers. When Allen Iverson led the team to defeat the Bucks in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals to advance to the Finals, this time the 20-year rival battle will be played on the floor of the Finals.

This match is so eye-catching, not only because of the two teams' historical encounters, but also because they are also two of the most watched teams in the East and West this season. One is the defending champion, who was slightly dormant in the regular season, but was invincible in the playoffs, destroying all the way and rushing to the finals with an unprecedented record of three rounds of sweeps; The other shone in the regular season, leading the way to become the brightest star of the year, and in the playoffs, they walked on thin ice, playing very hard and tenaciously all the way, and finally returned to the finals with the double blessing of strength and luck.

The first Finals game is in Los Angeles, and the Lakers are on the rise, and they have the potential to create a playoff unbeaten myth. In particular, their opponents were the Philadelphia 76ers, the creators of the best playoff record in NBA history, who shaved the Lakers in the 1983 Finals and lost only once in the playoffs. If they can win this honor by sweeping the 76ers, it will mean a lot to the Lakers.

At Staples Arena, fans with painted brooms or placards with the word "Sweep" on them shook them uncontrollably, shouting and pressuring the weak Philadelphia 76ers. The whole arena was filled with a frenzied agitation, almost topping the arena upside down.

In the box above the arena, Celtics' trusted assistant coach Fox Leon was quietly sipping a cold beer with the team's deputy general manager, Darryl Morey.

Morey was a very tall guy, about 6'6, with a white chubby face and a baby-like smile. He attended MIT, where his interest was in mathematics, and after graduating he founded a company that provides operational data analytics and sports information consulting to professional teams, including Celtic.

Chris Wallace had worked with Darryl Morey over issues with the team's operational data, and when Leon arrived at the Celtics, Pitino was forced to quit and basketball data was on the move, Morey was hired by Wallace as the team's deputy general manager, specializing in data theory and data integration.

According to Chris Wallace's idea, scouts like Leon are responsible for the collection and initial processing of the data, CFO Wesland provides technical support, and Morey does the final collation and theoretical support of the data, hoping to find the direction of the team's development in the vast numbers.

After a season of hard work, data theory has successfully become an important basis for Celtics coaches' coaching, selection and management, but it is far from the point of guiding ideology, and experience, intuition and connections still dominate the team's operation. This is a good start for Morey, and at least a lot of things prove that there is still a lot of potential for the use of mathematics in sports.

"The data shows that the probability of the Lakers winning this game is ...... It should be in ...... percent Between seventy and eighty percent. Morey took a sip of his beer and pulled out his small notebook and said to Leon.

The two traveled to Los Angeles the day before yesterday to scout the Celtics' favorite picks, and they have three first-round picks in their hands at this year's draft, giving them ample opportunity to pick them.

"Which model did you use?" Leon lay casually in his seat, looking at the beer in his glass but not taking a sip.

"I used a Porbit regression model." Morey replied as he continued to sip his beer and scribble in his notebook with his pen.

"The premise of the Porbit model is that the implicit element residuals assume to obey a standard normal distribution, which is not a very good way to predict the outcome of a game, especially for a special match like the Grand Final. If you use it to calculate the regular season win rate, it's not bad. And are your assumptions set strictly? It doesn't make sense if it's not strict enough, there are too many variables, and to be honest, I'm not sure to do a good setup. Of course, if you can't figure it out, I can do the math for you. Leon said as he took a sip of the wine from his glass, then took the notebook from Morey's hand, tore off a piece of paper and scribbled on it with a pen for a while.

Porbit was solved using the extreme method of the maximum likelihood function, which was a piece of cake for Leon, and it didn't take long for him to figure out the answer, according to Morey's model, the probability that the Lakers would win the game was 74.5 percent.

"Seventy-four five, the probability of the Lakers winning, but who knows, I think the 76ers will win. So many people think that the Lakers will be swept away, and if it were me, I would kill the Lakers with a bite in my mouth, even if it was only one game. Over the course of his one-year scouting career, Leon has become more and more adept at combining data and intuition to look at basketball, and it's foolish to use data in isolation, and relying on intuition alone is nothing more than a matter of heaven.

At this point, the game had already begun, and with the massive Shaquille O'Neal and the tree-like Mutombo jumping in the center circle under the enforcement of Joe Crawford, the battle between David and Goliath began.

Morey seems to be more interested in Leon's calculations on his notebook, his eyes resting on the notebook most of the time, and indifferent to the game itself.

This was Morey's first business trip with Leon, and he had long heard of Leon's numerical talent, which was one of the reasons why he was willing to join Celtic.

However, he soon discovered that Leon was much busier as a scout than he was as a deputy general manager, and the two were not involved in each other's work responsibilities, so there was no opportunity to work together. After Leon became assistant coach, the scouting position became vacant again, and Chris Wallace decided to let Morey take charge of player signings instead of just paperwork. Leon continues to be in charge of rookie drafting, and free agent scouting has been discontinued, meaning he doesn't have to fly around the world except from March to June.

The course of the first game of the Finals was beyond most people's expectations, and the Lakers, with super inside O'Neal and new star Kobe Bryant, were not able to tear the 76ers apart directly at Stamps, but on the contrary, under the leadership of Iverson, the Black Shirts, who lacked talent and relied on tough defense and ugly positional offense, even maintained a six-point lead in the first half.

In the second half, the tenacious 76ers and Lakers went into hand-to-hand combat, especially in the fourth quarter, when both offenses came to a standstill, and the two teams unexpectedly went into overtime. In these five minutes full of uncertainty, Iverson, who had scored 41 points in regular time, scored 7 points in a row, and with a performance of 48 points in the game, he single-handedly knocked the invincible Lakers to the ground, so that the entire Staples fell silent, and the sound of sweeping will never appear in people's ears again.

Leon and Morey witnessed the miracle in the box, and at the end of the match, Leon said to Morey: "I should have made a bet with you before the game started, or I should have made a bet with the ** company, so that I can definitely make a big profit." ”

"I heard that almost all major casinos in the United States have banned you from entering, I wonder if the ** company will ban you from betting?" Morey joked.

"The casino or something, it's so boring, even if you invite me I won't go again. After all, there's nothing more fun and exciting to gamble than the annual draft convention. Okay, the game is over, let's go see our bets. ”

……………………

More than half a month ago, Auerbach officially announced in the Boston media as the president emeritus of the Celtics that the team's former scout Fox Leon will become the assistant coach of the Celtics, which is also the third assistant coach of the Celtics. The news didn't come as much of a surprise, as the New York media had already been buzzing with the news that Celtics' talented scout Fox Leon could become the team's assistant coach and eventually Auerbach's successor.

The main whistleblower is, of course, Pete Vicey, and Wojnarowski, as a good friend of Leon, also plays a role in fueling the fire. Overnight, Leon appeared in the sports headlines, and various rumors and anecdotes about him also appeared in small articles and sports reviews, especially Vicsi's writing that "he is the only one who can stop Auerbach from smoking cigars", which made Leon arouse the curiosity of many people and became "important evidence" that Leon will be Auerbach's successor. ”

However, with the playoffs in full swing and the much-talked-about Finals officially underway, news of the birth of an assistant coach was quickly forgotten in the wastepaper, and Leon's life doesn't seem to have changed much at the moment, as he did a year ago, and he still has to run around for the draft.

After Morey and Morey came out of Staples, both slightly drunk, they went to a café not far from the arena, where they had made an appointment to meet the people they wanted to meet.

Early contact with a rookie or a rookie's family member in the NBA is against league rules, and teams face severe penalties if such private contact is discovered. So Leon and Morey arrived in Los Angeles this time in the name of watching the finals, and now it's coffee time after watching the game.

In the café's box, Leon finally met face-to-face the young man he had been observing and loved, a guard from the University of Arizona, Gilbert Arenas.

"In fact, we didn't have to take the risk of arranging such an early meeting." Leon said this first thing when he saw Arenas. "Why?" Because there aren't too many teams looking forward to you. "So what?" "To show our sincerity."