From the NBA Cup to the coach’s challenge, NBA Executive VP of Basketball Strategy and Analytics Evan Wasch discusses his role in the league’s biggest rule changes and format updates.
While you may not know who he is, you’re likely familiar with his work if you’re an NBA fan gearing up to watch the start of the playoffs this weekend.
Evan Wasch is the league’s Executive Vice President of Basketball Strategy & Analytics, in charge of innovative initiatives aimed at improving the game in a number of ways. That can include scheduling, competition, and technological advancements, such as automating various aspects of officiating. Anything new that the league has changed in recent years — from the NBA Cup in-season tournament and the recently completed play-in tournament to the COVID bubble, the coach’s challenge, and changes to the All-Star Game and draft lottery odds — was conceived and formalized under Wasch’s department.
The MIT MBA and former consultant oversees a staff of 30, ranging from former players and referees to former robotics engineers and venture capitalists, who share a common thread: a passion for basketball, the ability to understand and solve problems, and genuine intellectual curiosity.
“My role is to make basketball the best possible product for our fans,” Wasch told Boardroom last month at the MIT Sloan Sports & Analytics Conference in Boston.
Wasch participated in a panel earlier that morning alongside Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey, Boston Celtics exec Mike Zarren, Sue Bird, and moderator Deepak Malhotra, a Harvard professor. They argued about whether nerds were ruining basketball, specifically whether the spike in 3-point attempts this season was negatively affecting the NBA and whether changes were needed to address this growing concern. While Morey argued that things were going too far, Wasch tried to lower the temperature, as he had been tracking the issue daily.
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The basketball strategy and analytics team is on the league’s front lines on recommending rules changes, business initiatives, player health and safety, reducing player and team travel, and monitoring integrity. Everything Wasch and his team do is guided by four fundamental principles: Maximizing time the league’s stars are on the floor, ensuring games that have competitive meaning, encouraging aesthetically pleasing gameplay, and promoting a good ratio of game action to stoppages throughout a game.
“For 10 years I’ve had a really talented team of folks trying to drive the game forward across all of those dimensions,” Wasch said.
Each morning during the season, basketball strategy and analytics receive a series of reports on everything from game length and trends to officiating calls. Most systematic elements they monitor and notice at the deepest levels may not necessitate any change. But they often spark ideas and lead to rigorous discussions. They’ll pressure-test why an idea is being considered, ensure it’s grounded in fact, and properly account for different stakeholder views in ways that Wasch said make it seem like a political lobbying process. He estimates that 90% of the department’s ideas end up on the cutting room floor and aren’t seriously considered, but that’s from a substantial funnel of different ideas and pitches, taking into account group discussions and the many suggestions from fans, media, and stakeholders.
When examining an idea, Wasch said the department tries to use quantitative information, such as surveys or behavioral research, to refine a plan or concept before sending it to a league committee for review. While specific rule changes need to go through the league’s competition committee, other major changes in formatting may need approval from the NBA Board of Governors and/or the players’ association.
While many ideas have a long runway for development, testing, and experimentation, some changes — like the groundbreaking shift to the bubble during the 2019-20 COVID season — are immediately triggered by outside circumstances. Wasch and his team had to come up with a plan quickly and nimbly to salvage the season in a groundbreaking, safe, and equitable way. And since the season was shortened and truncated, the league concluded that the fairest format to make up for the lost games was a play-in tournament, which took place that August. The tournament was positively received across the board and has stuck ever since, paving the way for other changes that the league may not have been as open to previously.
“That opened some eyes and minds to the possibility of further innovations to season structure that could make the game more competitive coming out of that,” Wasch said. “So there was a lot more energy for potentially innovative changes to the game, like playing in the in-season tournament.”
The NBA Cup took a lot of collaboration between the league, players association, and media stakeholders, which also had to account for added regular season games scheduled on the fly for those participating in the tournament’s knockout rounds so to not give the other teams too long a break in the middle of the regular season.
Success in optimizing the league’s All-Star format, however, has remained elusive. While the target score concept and charity elements had worked earlier in the decade, a new four-team mini-tournament fell flat in San Francisco in February, with complaints about in-game commentary that detracted from what was happening on the court.
“Obviously, we’re trying to create something that’s fun and entertaining for fans. Generally speaking, that’s going to require a little bit of competitiveness, but this is not intended to be the world’s greatest competition,” Wasch said. “It’s intended to be entertaining and fun, as the commissioner has said. If you actually take out some of the noise around the entertainment elements that maybe didn’t go so well, the feedback we got specifically about the basketball format was actually quite good. And with NBC coming in next year as our distribution partner for All-Star, it’s going to be an evolving challenge for us over time.”
Even once new ideas are implemented, Wasch’s team is obsessively tracking their progress through viewership data, fan surveys on everything from playing style to officiating, feedback from players, coaches, and general managers, as well as large swaths of behavioral data that can be broken down by game and minute. Some ideas are tested out in what Wasch referred to as the NBA’s in-house laboratory, the G-League.
Changes you may see make the jump to the league as soon as next year include having one free throw for each trip to the line — reducing every two or three-shot foul to one — having a target score for overtime, perhaps seven points, to limit player wear and tear, and not counting end-of-quarter half or full court heaves against a player’s field goal percentage to encourage players to attempt those shots.
Other current projects and ideas being addressed include automating more objective officiating decisions, such as out-of-bounds, goaltending, and shot clock reset calls, via a combination of camera and LiDAR technology in real-time. This would, Wasch said, allow referees to pay attention to more difficult, subjective calls that would ideally cut down the length of reviews and challenges, shortening the game.
As NBA fans hunker down to watch the playoffs, impactful changes implemented by Wasch and his team will be seen everywhere they look. And they’re already in the process of cooking up even more tweaks and rules that could be here sooner than you think.
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