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Mark Cuban's Mavericks have new eyes in the office.
Mark Cuban's Mavericks have new eyes in the office.
Photo: David Paul Morris of Bloomberg
Mark Cuban's Mavericks have new eyes in the office.
Mark Cuban's Mavericks have new eyes in the office.
Photo: David Paul Morris of Bloomberg
The owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, will look for any innovation he thinks that will help his team win, whether it's building the most sophisticated locker room in the NBA or the partnership with a company that makes custom cushions for its players in the hope of helping them. to sleep better. He has never hidden either the fact that he thinks the legalized sports game will be a boon for his team and for professional sports in general.
And when you combine these two streams of thought, you receive news from Thursday, Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe of ESPN, who report that Cuban hired former sports player Bob Voulgaris to be its director of quantitative research and development.
The Cubans "should use Voulgaris as a strategic thinker who will help look at the strategy on the ground in a comprehensive way," report ESPN scribes.
Voulgaris has long been a minor celebrity among a subset of NBA fans, garnering 143,000 subscribers on Twitter and making numerous appearances on Bill Simmons' podcasts. He won his first jackpot in 2000, betting his savings – about $ 80,000 – on the Los Angeles Lakers to win the NBA title with a 6.5-to-1 victory. the sporting game, and he continued to take it after picking a loophole in bookmakers' thinking, as Scott Eden explained in the ESPN magazine's 2013 edition:
"It all depended on how most bookmakers set their totals at half-time, the number of points expected in each half of the game. Each half, of course, matches his own playing period, and the fourth quarter ends lengthy free throws, dead time, fast play and, therefore, an explosion of goals, but, unbelievably, the bookmakers of the time did not take into account this fact, they had simply reached a total for the full game and cut that number roughly in the middle, assigning about 50% points to the first half and 50% to the second half. "
For years, Voulgaris has exploited this advantage, playing both sides repeatedly. It is possible to say that it has earned him millions, combined with some observations on the game management trends of three major coaches: Eddie Jordan, Jerry Sloan and Byron Scott. "There were three coaches that I had nailed perfectly," says Voulgaris, now 37 years old. "I knew exactly what they were going to do – I mean, it was a joke, it was so easy."
From there, his playing career slowed down and weakened as line makers gained intelligence to thwart such thinking. Voulgaris and a partner have also developed Ewing, a computer model simulating games based on groundbreaking NBA data unleashed on the world at the turn of the century. But playing games was one thing; having a stake in the game is something quite different, and this thought has brought Voulgaris to the point of signing a contract with an anonymous co-owner of an NBA franchise during the 2009-10 season, so to consult on the construction of the team. The work lasted five months.
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Voulgaris, a native-born Canadian, has caught his father's gambling virus, which he affectionately described as a "borderline degenerate" in a 2011 Business Insider story. But even though his father did not go to school. is never enriched by betting on horses and the like – he Vougaris said the lessons learned from his formative years were crucial.
"I learned a lot from my dad, but most of the things I learned are the ones that did not work," he told Business Insider. "I learned that if you did not have the advantage over something you were not going to win, I learned that if you did not moderate your temperament and did not If you do not think rationally, no matter how big of your advantage, you're probably not going to win in the long run, and I've also learned that in life you have to be ready to take risks, because often the biggest bet is to sit and wait for the perfect opportunity that may never come up. "
All of this – aside from perhaps the moderate temperament part – must be of utmost importance to Cuban and his followers of innovation. As well as Voulgaris's courage on his ability to help an NBA team.
"It's going to sound really arrogant, but the whole process has led me to think that I would be able to build a better team than almost all league CEOs," he said. Eden in 2013. "Otherwise, maybe not, everything."
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