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.

Book Review: When Will There Be Good News

I bought this book when it came out. It came highly recommended and with a lot of splashy reviews. I had a hard time getting into the story, especially with the way the story started. It was very disconcerting.

I picked it up and put it down a number of times in the interim. This year I decided that I must persevere at least up until the half way mark; I am happy that I persevered, for this is a remarkable book, even though it is gloomy and dark. 

A professor once said that a good mystery starts with the murder weapon introduced on the first page, and the murder is solved on the last with the weapon prominently featured. While not following the edict exactly, Kate Atkinson does marvelous work entering tidbits of facts, clues and descriptions that makes very little sense initially but as the story gets rolling along, the tidbits begin to fit together in a coherent manner. She has a masterful way of describing and observing the people’s surroundings with their inner voice, their personality. Her eye for detail and words make those scenes, even when it is a head fake, extremely interesting to read.

The characters are well thought out and well developed; you see them as others see them as well as how they see themselves. Not all of them are sympathetic obviously, but the reader does hang their words as the story develops. They are all flawed in their own way, they have all been damaged in their own way, which is what makes for the tapestry of the plot so intriguing and enthralling. Atkinson is the weaver of multiple complex threads to create this tapestry. Even when she telegraphs the plot twist, I didn’t mind much as I was engrossed in the telling.

Without giving away the plot, the story involves the survivor of a long ago senseless crime, a young orphan girl, and a couple of police detectives, one former and one present, their entanglements, past and present. The resolution of the full story was complete without seeming fanciful, except for a couple of the storylines felt rushed at the end, as resolutions are wont to be.

A bonus for me is that part of the story takes place in Scotland, one of my favored locales. While the comparison to the Tartan Noir School could be loosely drawn, I would place this novel on its own because it is so uniquely told.

I am now a Kate Atkinson fan. More books to buy.