More stories

  • in

    5 W.N.B.A. Draft Hopefuls to Watch

    A deep run in the N.C.A.A. tournament isn’t required for a basketball player to become a star or make it to the pros. These five women aim to prove it.W.N.B.A. teams covet versatile, two-way play, and scores of players in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament displayed the skill, basketball I.Q. and strength to thrive in the professional ranks on both ends of the floor.Several players who hope to be picked in the W.N.B.A. draft on Thursday night made deep tournament runs and had the big stages of the later rounds to prove their readiness. The players whose teams made early exits, however, were left to hope that their individual performances were strong enough to be remembered — or that one subpar outing would not overshadow an otherwise impressive collegiate career.Here’s a look at five players who either didn’t make or didn’t last long in this year’s tournament but may still be one of the 36 drafted Thursday night. With the league’s 12 teams allowed just 12 roster spots each, an even slimmer number will make opening day rosters.Chelsea Dungee, ArkansasDungee set the Arkansas women’s career record for free throws made in just three seasons.Sean Rayford/Associated PressThe Razorbacks’ first-round exit from the tournament was not a reflection on the 5-foot-11 guard Chelsea Dungee. Her game-high 27 points mirrored her high-scoring collegiate career, but they came in a game in which the opposing team, Wright State, hit 50 percent of its 3-pointers (to the Razorbacks’ 31.8 percent) in a 66-62 win.During her 2020-21 senior season, Dungee scored in double figures in all 27 games. She scored 30 points or more in 12 games in her career, the most in team history. Free throws are an important part of her offensive repertoire; she exploits mismatches, draws fouls and makes 80.2 percent of her shots from the line.Against Wright State, she made 14 free throws on 18 attempts — fitting for the leading free-throw shooter in Arkansas history. That she set the record for made free throws (552) in just three seasons — Dungee sat out the 2017-18 season because of N.C.A.A. transfer rules — emphasized her sharpshooting game. The record had been 485, by Bettye Fiscus in the 1980s.N’dea Jones, Texas A&MJones averaged a double-double over her last three seasons at Texas A&M and helped her team reach the round of 16 in this year’s tournament.Dawson Powers/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIf a dogged defender who made a name for herself by gobbling up rebounds and otherwise converting defense into offense is what a W.N.B.A. team seeks, it should look no further than N’dea Jones.Setting aside a freshman season in which she averaged only about six minutes per game, Jones was Texas A&M’s biggest double-double threat, averaging 10.1 points and 11.1 rebounds a game in her final three seasons. Jones’s offensive production climbed year over year, including in the 2020-21 season that was shortened by the coronavirus pandemic. She pulled down her 1,026th career board as a senior, becoming the team’s career leader. She finished with 1,056, after just 33 as a freshman.Jones’s double-double effort against Troy to open this year’s tournament was followed by a 9-point, 14-rebound performance that helped the Aggies advance past Iowa State to the round of 16 in overtime. Texas A&M’s tournament run ended there, against a formidable opponent: Arizona, the eventual tournament runner-up, which was led by point guard Aari McDonald.Kasiyahna Kushkituah, TennesseeKushkituah reliably forced Tennessee’s opponents into sloppy possessions, leading to turnovers.Brianna Paciorka/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated PressSometimes the box score does not reveal the full truth, and so it goes for the 6-4 center Kasiyahna Kushkituah, who averaged 6.8 points and 6 rebounds per game as a senior at Tennessee.Even while starting just 23 of her 100 career games, Kushkituah began to carve out a niche for herself as an agile big. Her quickness was central to her ability to disrupt opponents’ offensive schemes; if she failed to record a steal or a block, she could reliably force opponents into sloppy possessions, leading to turnovers. And if the ball ended up in her hands, she could use her impressive speed to score on the break.The 3-point shot is not in her arsenal, but she made half of her field goals. If she can improve her 47.5 percent free-throw shooting and maintain an appetite for offensive rebounds — which accounted for more than a third of her total career rebounds — she could become an important paint presence for any W.N.B.A. team seeking depth at center. In Tennessee’s first-round win against Middle Tennessee, Kushkituah scored 10 points and grabbed eight boards, five of them off the offensive glass.Lindsey Pulliam, NorthwesternPulliam finished her college career averaging 16.5 points, 4.2 rebounds and 2 assists per game.Ronald Cortes/Associated PressCommonly referred to as Pull-Up Pulliam because of her smooth and reliable midrange shot, Lindsey Pulliam was the fastest player to reach 1,000 points in Northwestern women’s basketball history. A 5-10 guard, she finished her college career averaging a well-rounded 16.5 points, 4.2 rebounds and 2 assists per game. Her career shooting averages of 37.9 percent from the field, 26.6 percent from 3-point range and 75.6 from the free-throw line may not be the best in her draft class, but she has increasingly demonstrated that she can sizzle in the biggest moments, in whichever way her team needs:With a game- and season-high 28 points, Pulliam carried the Wildcats to a double-digit win on Jan. 21; one week later, in a road game against Iowa, she helped Northwestern to a 7-point victory by converting 12 of her 16 free-throw attempts.On defense, Pulliam secured 10 rebounds in early February against Ohio State (to go with 15 points) to help power Northwestern to a 12-point win. Her four steals against Eastern Kentucky in December helped the Wildcats score 40 points off turnovers and 28 on fast breaks on the way to a 29-point victory.Unique Thompson, AuburnThompson grabbed 43 percent of her rebounds on the offensive side of the floor.Butch Dill/Associated PressOvercoming an 18-point deficit but ultimately losing to Florida in the first round of the Southeastern Conference tournament kept Auburn from being invited to the N.C.A.A. tournament, denying the 6-3 forward Unique Thompson a national stage.Despite the loss, Thompson, with 14 points and 10 rebounds, made her standard double-double contribution in her final collegiate outing. In 2020-21, she was one of two players in the nation to record two games of 20-plus points and 20-plus rebounds. As a junior in the 2019-20 season, she tallied her 21st double-double of the season and the 41st of her career, surpassing the three-time W.N.B.A. All-Star DeWanna Bonner for the most in team history.If Thompson can improve her 66.3 percent free-throw shooting, she will solidify an otherwise stalwart game that features 52.8 percent shooting from the field. With a proficiency for cleaning the offensive glass — Thompson gathers 43 percent of her rebounds on the offensive side of the floor — she is ready to contend in the most competitive league in the world. Even without a national tournament run, Thompson seems poised for a first-round draft selection. More

  • in

    Arella Guirantes' Killer Sidestep Is Clearing a Path to the WNBA

    Arella Guirantes, the star Rutgers guard, hopes to be drafted by her hometown team, the Liberty, this week. But no matter where she ends up, she said she’ll be ready.Arella Guirantes has seemed destined for the W.N.B.A. ever since she stood 4 feet 7 inches tall as a fifth-grader on the varsity team in summer league at Bellport High School on Long Island. Her basketball skills have always been steps ahead of her peers’, and her ambition to be the best against any level of competition has pushed her to the next level.Guirantes, 23, remembers a game from her senior year at Bellport, not for scoring 58 points, but for what she didn’t do. She was alerted with around 2 minutes left that she had scored 50 points, but she wanted 60. She’d missed her team’s first blowout loss against that day’s opponent, Kings Park High School, for showing up 20 minutes late to school.“I just like mentally took a note,” Guirantes said. “When I play them again, I’m going to kill them.”Guirantes brought that competitive fire to Rutgers, where she led the Big Ten in scoring as a redshirt junior during the 2019-20 season with 20.6 points per game and topped that number in the 2020-21 season with 21.3 points per game. Now she appears on the brink of her W.N.B.A. destiny, with the draft on Thursday and Guirantes projected to be one of the top picks.“I mean, every day in practice, she was always that one player that you knew that was just going to compete,” said Kelley Gibson, a former recruiter and assistant coach at Rutgers. “You know, players show up and just sometimes work hard in practice, but Arella competed.”Guirantes is foremost a scorer, and an efficient one at that. In her redshirt senior season, she shot 41.6 percent from the field and 37.8 percent from 3-point range on 4.3 attempts per game. She also had per-game career highs in assists (5.2) and steals (2.2) steals. She was named first team All-Big Ten for the second consecutive year and awarded All-Big Ten Defensive Team honors.No. 11-seeded Brigham Young upset Guirantes and No. 6-seeded Rutgers in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament with a 69-66 victory.Chuck Burton/Associated PressOne of Guirantes’s signature plays is the jaw-dropping sidestep she uses to create space away from her defender off the dribble. She absorbs contact with her strong frame to fade away and shoot off either foot, moving in either direction using constant changes in speed.“You know what, now that you mention that, she did hit me with a couple of those,” said Dennis Smith Jr., a point guard with the N.B.A.’s Detroit Pistons, who has trained with Guirantes.Guirantes’s individual moves are stellar, and her series of jabs, in-and-outs and spins led her to finish in the 86th percentile of all scorers in isolation situations, according to Synergy Sports. But W.N.B.A. front offices are just as excited by her success in pick-and-roll situations. She ranked in the 90th percentile of all players as the ballhandler during the 2020-21 season, according to Synergy Sports.Scoring isn’t the only reason Guirantes’s name has shot up draft boards. Defensively, she’s a hawk, plucking passes and stripping ballhandlers. She’s also a bully down low, afraid of no one. “Oh, yeah, one thing I can tell you for sure,” Smith said. “She ain’t ducking no smoke. That’s a promise. She ain’t ducking no smoke.”Despite standing six inches shorter than the 6-foot-5 Charli Collier of Texas, who some think could be drafted first over all, Guirantes recorded more blocks per game. She credits many of her defensive instincts to her time playing middle blocker in volleyball. “I think I have a good just I.Q. for the game to understand where people on offense are going, when they’re going to put the ball up,” she said. “I have good timing.”The W.N.B.A.’s 2021 draft class isn’t heralded as a strong one, but an experienced scorer like the 5-foot-11 Guirantes could be an immediate-impact player for a contender. She’ll be up against the likes of Aari McDonald from Arizona, Dana Evans from Louisville and Rennia Davis from Tennessee to be the first guard taken off the board. Unlike those three, her team, a No. 6 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament, was upset in the first round, by No. 11-seeded Brigham Young, 69-66. Fortunately for her, scouts have had five years to assess her talent.“I don’t know if she’s separated herself,” said James Wade, head coach and general manager of the Chicago Sky. “I think when you talk about big guards, you can mention Davis in the same breath. I think it’s more of what you’re looking for and how they kind of fit into your team and the players that you have.”He continued: “I do think that she is a high-quality guard because of all the things that she can do — her strength, the fact that she can create her own shot. I think she has certain qualities that separate her from the bunch, but at the same time it depends on what you’re looking for, versatility defensively or versatility offensively, which I think she has a lot of offensively.”Detroit Pistons guard Dennis Smith Jr., who has trained with Guirantes, said she’s not afraid to challenge anyone. “She ain’t ducking no smoke.”Kenneth Ferriera/Lincoln Journal Star, via Associated PressWade said he believed Guirantes would be selected within the first six picks, three of which belong to the Dallas Wings. Mock drafts place Guirantes as high as No. 3 to the Atlanta Dream. Guirantes said she will be happy no matter where she lands, but the Long Island native is making it no secret that she’d love to play for the Liberty, who hold the No. 6 pick.“That would be a dream come true,” said Guirantes, who grew up going to Liberty and Knicks games at Madison Square Garden with her family and friends from the Boys and Girls Club. The Liberty now play at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.“The Garden has a special feel, but the transition to the Barclays I can’t say is a bad transition,” Guirantes said. “I’d really love to play at the Barclays Center.”The W.N.B.A. draft will be held virtually for a second straight year because of the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday, and Guirantes will be lying low until then, working on her game and training. She plans to watch the draft with her family and sweat out the moments until her name is called. In the meantime, she’ll try to avoid looking at mock drafts and people critiquing her game on social media. Maybe playing with Donkey Kong in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate video game on her Nintendo Switch against Smith will pass the time.Wherever Guirantes lands on Thursday night, she’s going to be ready.“My short-term goal is to really come in and make a quick transition,” Guirantes said. “I know it’s a lot easier said than done. But I want to make a huge impact and be in the running for rookie of the year. I think if you’re not going for rookie of the year, then you’re not really trying to help your team as much as you think you are.”She knows about starting strong: In only the second game of her college career, with Texas Tech before she transferred to Rutgers, she sank a buzzer-beating shot to force overtime against Texas A&M.“I really want to make a strong first impression in the W.N.B.A. because the way you start your career is important,” Guirantes said, adding: “That translates to overseas, too. They’re watching. A strong first year in the W.N.B.A is important.” More

  • in

    N.F.L. Steps Out of the Basement for 2021 Draft

    Rebounding from the 2020 version that saw Commissioner Roger Goodell announcing picks from his basement, the league announced plans for an in-person event in Cleveland.Commissioner Roger Goodell eschewed bro hugs and a podium during the N.F.L. draft last April, when he was forced to announce teams’ picks from his wood-paneled basement as the league conducted the event virtually while the coronavirus raged.For part of the night, when New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick briefly left his setup at a dining table, his pet dog, Nike, seemed to be orchestrating the franchise’s moves. TV cameras captured the husky sitting near its owner’s computer.Arizona Cardinals Coach Kliff Kingsbury drafted from his luxurious, white modern home, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones sent in his choice from below deck on his yacht. Scenes of both men went viral because of their backdrops, and a record 15.6 million people watched the first round despite its teleconference feel.The 2020 N.F.L. draft was very different from the glossy production that the league has become used to hosting. Since 2015, the three-day event has grown from a staid broadcast to a multi-location football festival with musical performances. The event last year was supposed to culminate with an extravagant display in Las Vegas, where drafted players would be ushered by boat to a stage floating in the fountain outside the Bellagio Hotel & Casino. That plan was moved to 2022.The N.F.L. announced Monday that the coming draft, slated to take place from April 29 to May 1, will be a bridge between the league’s recent extremes. Goodell will once again announce selections from a stage, this time in Cleveland, and team personnel will once again be allowed to work from so-called war rooms, as long as they follow local health guidelines. ESPN, ABC and the NFL Network will televise the event.This version of the annual spectacle will marry the ceremony of the league’s recent drafts with the socially distanced production elements from last season. Some rookies will still participate virtually from their homes, while mask and distancing requirements will be in place for those on site in Cleveland. The N.F.L. did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how many prospects will be in Cleveland, or about whether health protocols will prevent the bear hugs between draftees and Goodell that have been a hallmark of the event.The draft will be the N.F.L.’s first public event since Super Bowl LV, which took place with a hybrid attendance model in Tampa, Fla. There, 22,000 fans — a relatively large number in the pandemic era but the lowest attendance ever for the event — watched in person, following masks and social-distancing measures, at Raymond James Stadium as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs.The prospect of a celebratory championship, or even completing a full season, had been in doubt in March 2020. But despite outbreaks at team facilities and the slew of schedule changes that resulted, the N.F.L. played all 256 regular-season games and a full playoff slate within the confines of the season’s planned start and end dates. From August through the end of the playoffs, 262 players and 463 team personnel, or 0.08 percent, contracted the coronavirus. Those statistics, along with a steady decline of infections and loosened local restrictions across the country, allowed some of the league’s teams to raise permitted attendance levels at games as the season progressed.Goodell will announce picks from an outdoor stage near Lake Erie, and invited fans from all 32 teams will watch from a nearby theater. Those fans must be fully vaccinated, according to a statement released by the league Monday. Entertainers, coordinated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, will also perform at the main stage. More

  • in

    A New League’s Shot at the N.C.A.A.: $100,000 Salaries for High School Players

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA New League’s Shot at the N.C.A.A.: $100,000 Salaries for High School PlayersThe Overtime Elite league proposes that providing a salary and a focus toward a pro career might be more appealing than college basketball’s biggest programs.Aaron Ryan, Zack Weiner, Dan Porter and Brandon Williams, executives of the sports media company Overtime and its new basketball league, aim to change the career pathway for young stars.Credit…OvertimeMarch 4, 2021Updated 9:49 a.m. ETA new basketball league backed by a sports media company is entering the intensifying debate over whether student athletes should be paid, by starting a new venture offering high school basketball players $100,000 salaries to skip college.The league, Overtime Elite, formed under the auspices of the sports media company Overtime, would compete directly with the N.C.A.A. for the nation’s top high school boys by employing about 30 of them, who would circumvent the behemoth of college sports.Overtime will offer each athlete, some as young as 16, a minimum of $100,000 annually, as well as a signing bonus and a small number of shares in Overtime’s larger business. The company will also provide health and disability insurance, and set aside $100,000 in college scholarship money for each player — in case any decide not to pursue basketball professionally.The trade-off is major: The players who accept the deal will forfeit their ability to play high school or college basketball.“People have been saying things need to change, and we are the ones changing it,” said Dan Porter, the chief executive of Overtime.Overtime is diving into an argument that has roiled American sports for generations — whether it’s appropriate for pro sports leagues to lure young athletes out of high school and college with big checks, or for colleges to exploit the talents of athletes for big money without compensating them beyond attendance costs.Since the 2006 draft, players have not been able to go directly to the N.B.A. after high school — they do not become eligible to be drafted until the year they turn 19 or at least one N.B.A. season after their high school graduation year.For decades, the N.C.A.A.’s rules on amateurism, now under challenge in courts and in state legislatures, have held back a swell of money from flooding toward young elite athletes. The system has always had fissures, and they have grown in recent years as federal and state lawmakers and the N.C.A.A. have considered some changes to let athletes earn some more money.You may not have ever heard of Overtime — especially if you are, say, over 30 — but if you are a sports fan you have almost certainly seen its videos.If a crazy highlight or moment from a high school game floated across one of your social media feeds, it was probably filmed by Overtime. If you saw any dunks from Zion Williamson before he played for Duke, they were probably filmed by Overtime. The company says its videos are viewed almost two billion times each month.Overtime, which was founded in 2016 and got an early investment from David Stern, the former N.B.A. commissioner, has made connections with young prospects by building its presence in high school gyms across the country, where filming rights are essentially free and the competition not nearly the same as the ever-shifting battle among media behemoths to televise college and professional sports.Overtime’s videographers are recognized by the players. Laurence Marsach, more commonly known as Overtime Larry and the host of many Overtime videos, is highly popular among fans of youth basketball. The Overtime “O” logo is a stamp of approval online, with teens and tweens even throwing it up in the background of their videos.The new league, Overtime Elite, most resembles soccer academies in Europe and elsewhere. The players, and possibly their families, will move to one city — Overtime says it is selecting between two choices — to live and train together. Overtime will hire education staffers to teach the athletes and help them get high school diplomas. A basketball operations division will include coaches and trainers and will be led by Brandon Williams, the former N.B.A. player who was also previously a front office executive for the Philadelphia 76ers and Sacramento Kings. The commissioner is Aaron Ryan, a former longtime N.B.A. league office executive.No players have been signed yet — so as not to ruin their eligibility during the current high school basketball season. But Porter and Zack Weiner, Overtime’s president, are confident that many of the top players ages 16-18 will join.“We think our system will be amazing for their basketball development,” Weiner said. “Will every single player make the N.B.A.? Maybe not every single one of them, but the large majority will become professionals.”But there are almost as many risks as there are benefits for the young athletes. Most start-up professional sports leagues, no matter how innovative, fail. Overtime Elite will require tens of millions of dollars to operate on the scale its founders envision, but if it does not succeed, its athletes could be left with nowhere to play.“We are genuine in really investing in hiring really serious and legitimate people to run every aspect of the company,” Porter said. “I don’t want to mess around with kids’ lives. I don’t want people to mess around with my kids’ lives. There is a moral obligation that goes with that.”Weiner said the company is “extremely well capitalized” to launch the league. Overtime, Porter added, raised a “meaningful” amount of cash in a previously undisclosed funding round last fall, and planned to use it to pay players, hire employees and lease housing, office, gym and education spaces.Some details on what the league will actually look like or how fans can watch are still unsettled. There will be no permanent teams, but instead dynamic rosters within the league, and Porter and Weiner envision some sort of barnstorming tour of Europe. Games will no doubt be viewable online, but Overtime promises the games themselves and content around them won’t look too similar to typical basketball telecasts.Overtime Elite isn’t the only basketball league that spies opportunity in the shifting rules around amateurism and a desire by players to get paid immediately. David West, a former N.B.A. player, has started the Professional Collegiate League, and the N.B.A.’s development league has recently begun courting top 18-year-olds who want to skip college altogether on their way to the N.B.A.But Overtime Elite is the first serious league aimed at paying high school players, LaVar Ball’s failed Junior Basketball Association notwithstanding.Porter and Weiner talk down the idea that they are challenging high school state athletic associations, the N.C.A.A., high school coaches and the many other entities invested in the current system.“We are not against the N.C.A.A.” Carmelo Anthony, an Overtime investor and member of its board of directors, said in an interview. “We are not against the N.B.A. We are not trying to hurt those guys or come at them. We want the support of the N.B.A. and N.C.A.A. Eventually we are going to need those guys anyway.”Carmelo Anthony during his championship run at Syracuse in the 2002-3 season.Credit…Kevin Rivoli/Associated PressAnthony has an interesting perspective on Overtime Elite in part because, for all of the trade-offs of college sports, he is one its most visible success stories. He played college basketball for one season with Syracuse, won the N.C.A.A. tournament for the university’s first championship, improved his draft stock and got a huge boost in name recognition.“Going to college and playing college basketball is what it is,” he said. “It never will change. The concept of Overtime Elite is not to disrupt that, but to give these kids opportunities because they are taking control of their own brands and what they do, and social media becoming so powerful. Why not embrace that?”Perhaps the biggest challenge for Overtime, besides convincing enough elite players to join its league and enough consumers to watch high school basketball, is the floodgates opening to alternative ways for players to make money while also playing for high school and college teams.Under rising pressure from Washington and the nation’s statehouses, some of which have already approved legislation to require defiance of existing N.C.A.A. rules, the association spent months crafting new policies only to postpone votes that were planned for January.The turmoil within the N.C.A.A. is unfolding as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this month about whether the association may limit education-related benefits for top football and basketball players. And on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been circulating a range of proposals that could set a national standard for name, image and likeness rules, including some particularly aggressive ideas to give athletes a bigger slice of the industry’s profits (Congress is not expected to act imminently and no proposal has advanced beyond a committee).The political forces were already complicating the long-term strategy of the N.C.A.A., which makes most of its money from its signature men’s basketball tournament. Overtime Elite, if it can succeed, would make the N.C.A.A.’s chase for players even more difficult.Alan Blinder More

  • in

    Tom Konchalski, Dogged Basketball Scout, Dies at 74

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTom Konchalski, Dogged Basketball Scout, Dies at 74He traveled to schools, camps and schoolyards to evaluate high school players, and his reports were essential to college coaches in their recruiting.Tom Konchalski in 2013 at a high school basketball game in Brooklyn. Though he didn’t drive a car, he traveled throughout the East for more than 40 years, scouting high school basketball players.Credit…Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesFeb. 21, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETFor more than 40 years, Tom Konchalski was a fixture in gyms, summer camps and tournaments from Maine to West Virginia, a soft-spoken high school basketball scout whose newsletter was required reading for college coaches craving insights about potential recruits.He showed prescience about future N.B.A. players like Kyrie Irving, Bernard King and Kenny Anderson, but his focus was primarily on creating opportunities for high school players at all levels of college basketball, whether at Division I, II or III schools, or in Canada. A devout Roman Catholic, he thought of players as his ministry.“You’d read his report, mark down names you wanted to investigate, and you took what he said as gospel,” said Dave Odom, a former coach at Wake Forest University and the University of South Carolina, where he recruited a guard, Tre Kelley, whom he learned about from Konchalski’s newsletter. “Tom saw the kid in a summer league, and I followed up with him.”Konchalski, who retired last year from publishing the newsletter High School Basketball Illustrated, died on Feb. 8 in hospice care in the Bronx. He was 74. The cause was prostate cancer, said his brother, Steve, who is retiring after 46 seasons as the men’s basketball coach at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. For his newsletter, Konchalski assessed players in 13 categories and offered colorful accompanying comments about them like “loaded with offensive chutzpah” and “scores like we breathe!”“He had a genuine interest in getting his evaluations right,” said Bob Hurley Sr., who was the basketball coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J., for 45 years until the school closed in 2017. “He would never rush. If someone had a bad game, he promised to come back.”Konchalski’s long career made him the subject of a short ESPN documentary in 2013 and earned him a nomination in December from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in the contributor category. Honorees will be announced in April.Thomas Coman Konchalski was born on Jan. 8, 1947, in Manhattan and grew up in the Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens. His father, Stephen, was a general foreman with the New York City Department of Parks and a semipro baseball player. His mother, Marjorie (Coman) Konchalski, was a homemaker who later worked as a department store cashier.Tom was 8 when he and his brother, who is two years older, went with their father to an N.B.A. doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. The brothers eventually took the subway on their own to see games at the Garden and at schoolyards around the city.And he was 14 when he first saw Connie Hawkins play. Hawkins, the exhilarating star of Boys High School in Brooklyn, was demonstrating his prowess during a summer league game, and it was an epiphany for young Tom.“I would follow him from playground to playground,” Konchalski told The New York Times in 2013. “His game was electric. With one hand, he could palm a rebound out of the air.”At Archbishop Molloy High School in the Briarwood section of Queens, where his brother played guard on its basketball team, Konchalski covered the team for the school newspaper and learned the intricacies of basketball from Jack Curran, Molloy’s coach from 1958 to 2013.“Tom never really played,” Steve Konchalski said in a phone interview. “He’d go to the park and put up some shots, and he had a nice shooting touch. But it wasn’t his thing to compete. He got the height. I’m 6-2. He’s 6-6.”Konchalski, center, with Syd Neiman, left, and Konchalski’s uncle, John Coman, when they were officials for the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Forest Hills, Queens.After graduating from Fordham University in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Konchalski taught math and social studies at a Roman Catholic school in Queens (and for a time pursued another sports interest, as a linesman at the U.S. Open tennis championships, and its predecessor, when they were played at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills).Konchalski’s path to scouting was accelerated by coaching Catholic Youth Organization basketball teams in New York City. His expanding knowledge of local players led him to part-time scouting in the 1970s for Howard Garfinkel, the influential founder of High School Basketball Illustrated and a co-founder of the Five-Star Basketball Camp, a celebrated youth instructional showcase for future superstars, among them Michael Jordan and LeBron James.Konchalski left teaching to work full-time for Garfinkel in 1979; five years later he bought H.S.B.I. In 1980, Konchalski famously helped get Jordan — then known as Mike Jordan — into the Five-Star camp at the request of Roy Williams, an assistant coach at the University of North Carolina, which was recruiting Jordan (and which he would attend) and wanted to see him play against high-octane competition.Not yet well-known, Jordan stunned the camp with his play.“In tryouts when people were guarding him, they were guarding his belly button,” Konchalski recalled last year in an interview with Forbes magazine. “He had a great stop/ jump. He’d stop on a dime and really elevate. He was an extraterrestrial athlete.”Konchalski — who was known for his detailed recall of games and players from decades earlier — was something of a Luddite. He did not own a computer, a cellphone or an answering machine. Working from his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, he typed each of the 16 annual issues of his newsletter, stapled them and mailed them in manila envelopes to about 200 coaches, who subscribed for several hundred dollars a year. He did not post his publication online.“I have an electric typewriter,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1990. “That’s my concession to the ages. I always say I was born seven centuries too late.”He did not drive, so he commuted to and from games by train or bus, and was nicknamed the Glider for the way he quietly slipped into a gym, settled onto the top level of the stands and started taking notes on players on a legal pad.In addition to his brother, he is survived by a sister, Judy Ball.In 1976, Konchalski saw that Chris Sellitri, a 6-foot-5 forward at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn, had no scholarship offers from colleges in the United States.“Today, a player who made All-Brooklyn would get a scholarship,” Steve Konchalski said. “But back then, some outstanding players fell through the cracks. So Tom directed me to Chris, and he became the leading rebounder in the history of our school.”He added: “He wouldn’t tell a kid, ‘Go to my brother’s school,’ but he’d say to me, ‘This kid is still available — here’s his coach’s name and my evaluation.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    Ted Thompson, Who Helped Revive the Packers, Is Dead at 68

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTed Thompson, Who Helped Revive the Packers, Is Dead at 68As Green Bay’s general manager, he made the decision — contentious at the time but later consequential — to draft Aaron Rodgers in the first round.Ted Thompson at the Green Bay Packers’ training camp in 2005, the year he returned to the team as general manager after five years with Seattle.Credit…Morry Gash/Associated PressJan. 23, 2021, 7:57 p.m. ETTed Thompson, who as a longtime executive of the Green Bay Packers helped revive one of football’s most enduring dynasties, died on Wednesday at his home in Atlanta, Texas. He was 68.His death was announced by the Packers.The team did not specify the cause of death. But after he was inducted into the Packers Hall of Fame in 2019, Thompson disclosed that he had been found to have an autonomic disorder, which affects the part of the nervous system that controls involuntary actions like the beating of the heart.Thompson spent eight years in the Packers’ personnel department in the 1990s, when the team rose from its two-decade slumber to regain its swagger with Brett Favre at quarterback and captured a Super Bowl title in the 1996 season. After a five-year stint with the Seattle Seahawks, Thompson returned to Green Bay in 2005 as general manager and immediately made one of his most contentious yet consequential decisions: drafting quarterback Aaron Rodgers out of the University of California, Berkeley, in the first round.Thompson — who eschewed signing free agents, preferring to stockpile draft picks and to take the best player still available in the draft regardless of his position — said he was surprised that Rodgers hadn’t been picked earlier on the first night of the 2005 draft.“I have no clue as to what happened and why it turned out the way it did,” he said with typical understatement. “I think the good Lord was shining down on the Green Bay Packers, and certainly me.”The pick set off alarm bells because it signaled the beginning of the end of Favre’s long tenure with the Packers. Favre, then in his mid-30s, was celebrated for his role in reviving the franchise, and for his outsize character, which made him one of the faces of the N.F.L. But grabbing Rodgers was a prescient move. Favre’s production, while still solid, had slowed.Favre, who turned 36 that fall, felt snubbed and toyed with the idea of retirement. After the 2007 season, he left Green Bay for the Jets; he later played for the Minnesota Vikings.Rodgers took over the starting role after three years as Favre’s understudy. He had a rough first season, and Thompson was widely criticized for having drafted him; some Packers fans created websites calling for his dismissal. But Rodgers soon caught his stride and helped catapult the Packers into another decade of sustained success, including, in the 2010 season, the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl championship.(The Packers will vie for another shot at the Super Bowl on Sunday when they play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the N.F.C. championship game.)In addition to Rodgers, who has won the N.F.L. Most Valuable Player Award twice, Thompson signed cornerback Charles Woodson, the league’s defensive player of the year in 2009; linebacker Clay Matthews, the franchise leader in sacks; wide receiver Jordy Nelson; and more than a dozen other players who made at least one Pro Bowl appearance.Thompson was named N.F.L. executive of the year by his peers in 2007 and 2011.Ted Clarence Thompson was born on Jan. 17, 1953, in Atlanta, Texas. His father, Jimmy, was a rancher, and his mother, Elta, was a homemaker. He helped his father, who was also a Little League coach and a disciplinarian, by feeding the cattle on the ranch.Growing up in East Texas in the heart of football country, Thompson played running back, linebacker and place-kicker in high school. At Southern Methodist University, he was a starter for three years and was named to the academic All-Southwest Conference team; he also played on the baseball team. He finished with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.Signed as an undrafted free agent by Coach Bum Phillips of the Houston Oilers in 1975, Thompson played linebacker with the Oilers for a decade, retiring after the 1984 season. He missed just one game because of injury.In his second stint in Green Bay, he grew into a towering figure at Lambeau Field, a talented scout who was considered humble. In 2017 he assumed an advisory role because of health concerns, according to the team’s president, Mark Murphy.Ron Wolf, Thompson’s predecessor and mentor in Green Bay, said that behind his protégé’s aw-shucks charm was a man with a self-made confidence.“You have to look at his history,” Wolf said before the Packers won Super Bowl XLV. “He wasn’t drafted. He hung on. That toughness manifests itself now in what he’s been able to accomplish. He did it like Sinatra — his way. And he did it with the most prestigious franchise in the N.F.L. from a historical perspective.”Thompson is survived by a sister, Debbie Fortenberry, and two brothers, Frank and Jim.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    Moisés Caicedo and the Perils of Too Much Interest

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerA Promising Star. A Gaggle of Suitors. A Wake of Vultures.It did not take long for the performances of a 19-year-old in Ecuador to catch the eyes of Europe’s biggest clubs. In soccer’s cutthroat transfer market, they were not the only ones watching.It did not take long for Moisés Caicedo to establish himself as a star for Independiente del Valle in Ecuador.Credit…Jose Jacome/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJan. 21, 2021, 8:30 a.m. ETNothing stays secret for long in soccer. So thorough is the game’s hunt for talent and so desperate its thirst for players that no territory goes uncharted, no stone unturned, no prospect unobserved. Distance is no barrier. Remoteness is not a factor. The searchlight is so bright that there is no such thing, any more, as obscurity.And so, over the course of the last year, the powerhouse clubs of Europe’s major leagues have been turning their attention to Sangolqui, a suburb to the south of the Ecuador’s capital, Quito. They have focused on a club that hardly uses its own tight, compact stadium, and on a teenage midfielder not yet two seasons into his senior career.Moisés Caicedo would not have known it — not until recently — but his name has been playing on the lips of scouts and technical directors across Europe for months.Few, if any, clubs from the old world have a dedicated scout for leagues like Ecuador’s. Instead, emerging players are spotted in South America’s continental competitions — the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana — or tracked through international youth tournaments.When a player of interest is identified, members of the recruitment staff trawl through footage of his domestic displays, and the corresponding performance data, on platforms like Wyscout, InStat and Scout7. Only then, if the numbers add up, will scouts — either club employees or trusted freelancers in specific markets — be sent to watch the player in person.An energetic and composed midfielder, Caicedo, now 19, passed every test. Manchester United’s South American scout alerted his employers to Caicedo’s ability. A.C. Milan found that the data and the assessment of their talent spotters tallied up. Club Bruges, the Belgian champion, noticed him, too. So did a phalanx of teams from England — Brighton and Chelsea among them. Nothing, after all, stays secret for long.All, independently, determined that Caicedo was an interesting proposition. Many of them started making discreet enquiries, performing the due diligence on both the player and his club — Independiente del Valle — to work out how a deal might be done. And they all heard precisely the same warning: Finding Caicedo was the easy bit. Working out how, exactly, to sign him would be much more difficult.A Rapid RiseCaicedo’s development came faster than his team expected, but the club felt it was a vindication of the model it built for finding stars.Credit…Pool photo by Rodrigo BuendiaEven at Independiente del Valle, there was some surprise at just how quickly the teenager the club had found playing in Santo Domingo — a small city a few hours west of Quito — had developed.When he moved to Sangolqui, Caicedo was not one of the standouts on the under-16 team that he joined, but he was quiet, determined, a fast learner. That squad contained several players who would represent Ecuador at the youth level, but by late 2019, Caicedo had outstripped them all.He made his league debut for Independiente in October that year, as a substitute against Liga de Quito; by the end of the month, he had his first start. In February 2020, he captained the club’s youth side to victory in the under-20 Copa Libertadores. When he returned, he went straight to the first team: He appeared in his first senior Libertadores game in April.If the speed of his success was a touch unexpected, it was treated within Independiente as vindication of the club’s model. Though the team had been founded in 1958, its modern incarnation came into being only in 2007, when it was taken over — and turned into a private enterprise — by a group of entrepreneurs, led by Michel Deller.“There was a clear vision,” said Luis Roggiero, the club’s sports manager. “There is a pool of talent in Ecuador that had not been given an opportunity to develop: The players that had come through had done so on their own merit, not because they found a club or federation that helped them. The idea was to construct a club to compete at national and international level by finding our own talents, finding them early, and developing them our way.”To do that, the club commissioned a study of the districts in Ecuador that produced the most players, Roggiero said, and then constructed training bases in each of them: dragnets to capture whatever talent came through. The best prospects would then be recruited to the club’s main training facility in Sangolqui — which contains accommodations for 120 young players and an on-site school — to be inculcated in the team’s style of play.“We built an idea of how we wanted to play, and then designed training — technical and physical and mental — to help them produce that,” Roggiero said. It was a long-term plan that has born fruit: In 2016, less than a decade after Deller and his associates found the club in Ecuador’s third division, Independiente reached the final of the Copa Libertadores, where it lost to Colombia’s Atlético Nacional. The club is now a regular sight in the latter rounds of South America’s biggest club competition.Roggiero attributes that success to the fact that — unlike many teams in Ecuador, and across South America — Independiente is privately owned. “We are not subject to elections, so we can have long-term horizons,” he said. “We can be responsible financially, we can maintain the same administration. The club can be sustainable. The idea has been reinforced by the results we have had in our short history. It shows the road we have chosen is valid.”Success on the field, though, is not the only gauge of the club’s success. So, too, are the players it has produced. Graduates from Independiente’s finishing school are now a regular sight on Ecuador’s various national teams: Seven members of the current men’s squad came through the club’s system, as did six players on the women’s national side. Scouts, agents and technical directors now flock to Sangolqui to scour its youth teams for signs of promise; an annual international under-18 tournament it hosts has become compulsory viewing for those in the recruitment business.In recent years, Independiente has been able to sell players not only to the leagues that have some tradition of importing from Ecuador — those in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil — but also, increasingly, to clubs in Europe: Players have left for Granada and Real Valladolid in Spain, for Italy’s Atalanta, for Brighton in England, for Genk in Belgium and for Sporting Lisbon in Portugal.As Caicedo’s star rose, it became clear that he would be the next to make that journey.But while more European teams might be aware of Independiente — and Ecuador as a whole, after a run of success for its international youth teams — as a source of talent, the country remains an unfamiliar market for most.Its clubs, generally, prefer to sell to other South American leagues, where the initial fee can often be higher; the most powerful agencies in the country tend to have well-established links with Brazil, Mexico and the United States. Few European teams have a presence, or a way in. For them, it can be uncertain, unfamiliar ground.And there are always plenty of people, in soccer’s transfer market, ready to capitalize on any uncertainty at all. Unfamiliarity, for some operators, means opportunity.The SquabbleMultiple teams in Europe have expressed interest in Caicedo. It is not entirely clear whom they must work with to acquire him.Credit…Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMost of Europe’s clubs received the same feedback when they started to delve a little deeper into Caicedo’s situation: It was not immediately clear, they were told, precisely who was representing the player, who had the power to agree to terms on his behalf. “Too many agents involved,” as the note sent to one recruitment department read.A transfer deal should, on the surface, be a straightforward thing. The buying club should — strictly speaking — contact the selling team, establish a price, and then contact the player’s agent in order to work out the personal terms.If that is a little naïve, then the pragmatic alternative — contact the agents first, find out if the player is interested, ask what a deal would cost, and then present the selling club with a fait accompli before haggling over price — might be more cynical, but it is not substantially more complicated.The reality, though, is much messier. Teams frequently give an agent a mandate to sell their own player, in order to retain a degree of negotiating power. Often, different agents will be given mandates to sell players to different countries: One will do the deal if an Italian team is interested, someone else if it is a Spanish club. Those mandates can then be traded and sold between agents.As soon as a talented player emerges, a suite of agents will typically descend on him, offering exclusive access to a particular team or league, or simply an ability to negotiate a better deal. Sometimes players sign multiple agreements with multiple agents, based on nothing more than promises.Most of those involved in recruitment accept this as the way things are, and the way they have always been across the world, though many find it especially difficult to untangle deals to take players out of South America. The sporting director at one major European club, though, believes the problem has become much worse since FIFA moved to deregulate agents in 2015. “Now, you can basically do anything you like,” said the director, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to address the issue publicly.It is precisely that sort of free-for-all that engulfed Caicedo. For much of his nascent professional career, he has been represented by Kancha, an Ecuadorean agency with a roster of young players and a cohort at Independiente. As clubs’ interest in him grew, though, so too did interest from agencies, eager to profit not only from his promise but also from teams’ comparative inexperience in buying players in Ecuador.Members of the Caicedo’s family — he is the youngest of 10 siblings, and has 25 nephews — were inundated with offers from agents seeking a mandate to sell him. Those close to the dealings, though not authorized to speak on the record about private business arrangements, said they believed that relatives had reached agreements with two of them: a German-based firm, PSM Proformance, and a company in Argentina. PSM Proformance did not respond to a request for comment.All of a sudden, there were three agencies — including Kancha — claiming to speak for Caicedo, to have the power to do a deal. Independiente, the club that had nurtured him, was effectively rendered irrelevant in the sale: It will receive roughly the same fee regardless of which agent strikes a deal, and is expected to ask for a clause that will bring the club a 30 percent cut on any future transfer, too.But if his club is unaffected, the same cannot necessarily be said of Caicedo. With multiple agents not only touting him across Europe but also peppering the news media, in Ecuador and farther afield, with tips about his potential destination, many clubs that had been enticed by Caicedo’s enormous promise chose to walk away. Manchester United and Milan both decided not to become embroiled in a situation they deemed too knotty to unravel.Others stayed the course. Brighton — currently considered his most likely destination — had the advantage of a pre-existing relationship with Independiente and Kancha, having signed a player from both in 2018. Caicedo will get his move: His talent, ultimately, guarantees that.What concerns those who have watched him flourish over the last couple of years is whether it will be the right move, for the right reasons. Caicedo’s rise, so far, has been unexpectedly, almost impossibly smooth. Being exposed to the perils of the transfer market, though, means the road ahead is littered with obstacles. He has been found. The risk now is that he might yet be lost.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    Can’t Measure Heart? N.F.L. Teams Are Trying

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCan’t Measure Heart? N.F.L. Teams Are TryingChampionships can be won and lost when players’ competitive fire kicks in and they exhibit faster-than-normal speed to make a crucial catch or chase down a tackle.Cardinals safety Budda Baker’s interception looked to be a pick-six until Seahawks receiver D.K. Metcalf chased him down for a tackle in October.Credit…Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesJan. 14, 2021Updated 6:41 p.m. ETSometimes it is a primal skill that matters most in football.“If you’re chasing a guy, can you catch him?” said Bill Belichick, the six-time Super Bowl champion coach of the New England Patriots. “Or if a guy is chasing you, can you outrun him?”In the N.F.L., scouts, talent evaluators, coaches and general managers spend tens of thousands of hours every year in a quest to identify which players are best at these fundamental skills. Despite all the complexities and intricate strategy of a modern pro football season, some of the most imperative evaluations still border on the rudimentary.The consensus, however, is that it’s not simply a measure of how fast someone runs, even if the 40-yard dash metric is ubiquitous and venerated. Sophisticated technologies can now quantify a dozen variables of a sprinting stride and decoding the clues within that data is a budding cottage industry, but there may also be more of a schoolyard ethos to the assessment.“It’s a little bit more in the heart than the stopwatch,” Belichick said last year on the topic, which is one of his favorites. “There’s competitive speed, or game speed.”It is not a trivial consideration: Championships can be won and lost on such plays. In addition to the countless examples of a wide receiver pulling away from a defender to get open for a deep touchdown pass or a running back bursting untouched through a team’s last line of defense, there are conspicuous illustrations of how a more self-evident, elementary skill can be the turning point of a pivotal game.On Thanksgiving Day this season, Terry McLaurin, a wide receiver for the Washington Football Team, was roughly 10 yards behind Dallas linebacker Jaylon Smith when Smith intercepted a pass at the Washington 47-yard line and had a clear path to the end zone for a game-tying score late in the third quarter. McLaurin dashed after Smith, and despite having to evade potential Dallas blockers stationed in his way, tackled Smith at the 4-yard line.The Washington defense then made a goal-line stand that forced Dallas to settle for a field goal. Demoralized, Dallas did not score again as an invigorated Washington rallied for three touchdowns and an easy victory. At season’s end, Washington was in the playoffs as the N.F.C. East champions because it had one more victory than Dallas and the Giants.“It was a huge play, just what we needed,” Washington Coach Ron Rivera said of McLaurin’s effort afterward.The aptitude for superior in-game speed may seem obvious to the naked eye, but in fact trying to figure out which college draft picks or potential free agents possess it in a way that will regularly show up on the field can be tricky. Nonetheless, it is a foremost aim of every N.F.L. team.“It’s talked about all the time because it is a complex assessment,” said Scott Pioli, the former general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs who was also a top executive with the Atlanta Falcons, New England Patriots and Jets. “We can all see what a player’s pure speed is when he’s running in a straight line in shorts at the league’s combine. But football is not a straight line game, it’s a lot of stopping and starting, it’s change of direction, it’s instincts and angles.”Pioli said Patriots scouts were perpetually asked to not only report a player’s timed speed, but his “playing speed,” as well.“The scout’s report might have a player running 4.5 in the 40, but the scout adds that he’s played faster than that,” said Pioli, who is now an analyst for CBS Sports HQ. “Or slower when he has pads on because football isn’t played in shorts.”There are outliers, and they can get lost, or found, in hours of film study conducted by pro personnel directors. Coming out of college, former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis was considered fast but was not necessarily projected to become the game-changing presence he turned out to be. Three linebackers and eight other defensive players were taken ahead of him in the 1996 draft. Wes Welker, a 5-foot-9 wide receiver who played for five N.F.L. teams and ranks 22nd in career receptions with 903, was not even invited to the N.F.L. scouting combine and went undrafted in 2004.“Lewis played much faster because of his intelligence, which helped him to read opponents’ tendencies,” Pioli said. “Undersized receivers like Welker, they also play faster because of their quickness. You have to look for all those attributes.”Teams are increasingly using tech help to recognize and verify those unique qualities. But it doesn’t always work as intended.With radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) placed in every N.F.L. player’s shoulder pads transmitting streams of data, pro personnel directors now have a trove of data at their disposal. The same information is also logged during practice sessions. Much of the same information is collected on players before the college draft. After Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman took wide receiver Jalen Reagor with the team’s first-round choice in 2020 he talked about Reagor’s RFID numbers and on-the-field speed.“You get the GPS numbers on these guys, so you can see how they’re running in games and their speed in games,” Roseman said of Reagor, who also ran a swift 4.47 second 40-yard dash. “He’s running at a really high level.”Looking to add speed to their offense, the Eagles drafted receiver Jalen Reagor, above, whose speed was tracked via radio frequency identification chips (RFID). Credit…Michael Conroy/Associated PressReagor was viewed as a disappointment this season for the Eagles, especially for such a high draft pick. He had 31 receptions this season for 396 yards and a touchdown, although he did miss five games to injury. Exacerbating the appraisal of Reagor was the 1,400 receiving yards (a rookie record) and 88 catches accumulated by Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson, who was selected 22nd overall in last spring’s draft, one spot after Reagor.Last week, Roseman conceded there were lengthy deliberations about draft-eligible receivers like Jefferson and Reagor. “Definitely a lot of opinions on this draft class and this receiver class for sure,” he said.While not specifically speaking about Philadelphia’s decision-making, Pioli said that leaguewide there were obstacles internally that impede teams from making the most fruitful judgments. Notably, a front office schism can stand in the way of a cooperative marriage between staffers who compile analytical data and coaches and other evaluators who are more likely to trust their eyes after in-person tryouts and hours of traditional film study.“This comes in when one of those two worlds, whether it’s the football people or the analytics people, don’t have enough respect for the other,” Pioli said. “Egos get in the way of arriving at the best answer.”Steve Gera, an ex-coach, scout and executive with the San Diego Chargers and Cleveland Browns, founded a company, BreakAway Data, with David Anderson, a former N.F.L. wide receiver, in part to help facilitate the divide between a team’s analytic resources and parts of the organization that came up through more customary football channels.Using wearable sensors, Gera and Anderson have developed isolated, football-specific tests for athletes that they have tried out on college campuses and in the X.F.L. “Then, we processed that data essentially into coach-speak,” Gera said, explaining that the information must be presented in a way that matches the nuanced level that coaches and scouts view the game. “That gets you closer to bridging the gap between stopwatch speed and competitive speed.”Steve Gera was a special assistant to Browns Coach Rob Chudzinski in 2013 before starting a company that helps analyze competitive speed for N.F.L. teams.Credit…Tony Dejak/Associated PressGera, who has worked with franchises in multiple sports, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, added: “You can tell a football coach that one of his players moves at 22 miles an hour, but what really matters is how much space did the player create or take away on the field, right? That’s the name of the game.”Seven years ago, Belichick, who has been effusive on the game speed versus timed speed subject for more than a decade, invited an undrafted free agent cornerback to a tryout at the Patriots practice complex after the 2014 draft despite the player’s significantly inferior 4.62 second, 40-yard dash time. In the audition, Belichick observed an innate quickness on the field and immediately offered a contract.Later that season, the player, Malcolm Butler, closed the space between him and Seattle wide receiver Ricardo Lockette to make a Super Bowl-clinching interception.Said Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll of Butler that night: “The guy makes a great play that nobody would ever think he could do.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More