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.
