Beta Ball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History-Erik Malinowski

I ran out and bought this book when I saw the premise and the title.  Especially the sub-title: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History.

The subject is the Golden State Warriors, and it promised to describe the method and thought process of how the franchise was built and nurtured by Lacob and Gruber.

Unfortunately, the book fell short of the promise made by the sub-title. In fact, the book didn’t even come close to fulfilling its promise, which is too bad because that would have made a much more interesting and much more unique sports book. The book, as I had imagined, would probably not make the amount of green that the publishers envisioned, but it would have been a more standout description of how to do the right things and being bold in accomplishing a goal purposefully.

It isn’t a bad book, in fact Malinowski does have great chops, and he has done copious amounts of interviews and research, and he has the ability to write an interesting story, His recitations of the Golden State history was better than the usual sports writing. In fact his prowess with the language is a redeeming feature of the book.

What is missing is the part about the business decisions, what made the new owners of the Warriors make the decisions they made and linking it to their successes in the Silicon Valley. To be fair, Malinowski did yeoman work in relaying the thinking  regarding the personnel decisions: general manager, coach, players, and staff. What he did not do was go further into depth into the stories of the people involved. He didn’t completely breeze by their stories, he did spend some time on Bob Myers, Steve Kerr, Stephan Curry, and other well-known figures but he failed to delve into the roles of the other assistants and how they fit into the picture, others have done much deeper stories on them since the book came out. Kerr’s unique take on the role of the assistant is partially responsible for the successes of team the last few years and the interaction is of great interest and a salient topic that would have been very interesting: how to coach the team that coaches the team.

As to the claim of science’s role in the success, Malinowski glossed over the what’s of the technology, describing in the least interesting manner possible what the technology is and what it did, he all but ignored how the coaching staff and the players used the technology to improve their games as well as any new ideas that have been sparked by having the technology. In this era of Big Data, it would have been very interesting to delve into how the statistics staff dove into the data and determined which of the data is the noise and which of the data is the signal. It is disappointing since he seemed to have good access to the entire organization, but he chose not to go into deeper investigation of those topics.

Those topics would have clearly differentiated this book from all the other sports books reciting the successes of a winning team.

This book could have put some distance between it and any of the other sports books and truly be a groundbreaking reportage of what made the Golden State Warriors the Golden State Warriors. This book could have been a contender, but it settled for sales and a role as an also-ran.