Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

  Williams is well known for his obsession with “paint touches,” or how often on offense his team can get the ball into the lane, or deny opponents those opportunities on the defensive end. He adjusts his philosophy on how best to get the ball there based on his personnel—his Elite Eight team at Marquette in 2012 was mostly undersized and more often got in the paint off the dribble than via the pass—but he harps on the overall concept so often that a Marquette basketball blog adopted Paint Touches as its name and Twitter handle while he was the coach there. Williams claims that field goal percentage is much higher on shots taken after the possession had a paint touch, even if the shot ultimately comes from outside the paint, than ones that don’t.

  So, in order to get his team playing in the style he wants, Williams concocts a variety of what he calls “whiteboard stats,” because he (and only he) writes everything he wants his team to understand data-wise on a gigantic whiteboard in the locker room. Some of them he refers to as SID stats, or the more basic box score and aggregation stuff that gets disseminated to the media and is available on team websites. Other stuff is more complex, but ultimately the message is presented in a discrete format that makes it easy to understand and maintain during games.

  “In all of the numbers that I study and all of the stuff I get into, I don’t relate all of that to our team. I don’t [even] relate all of that to our staff. But I do try to find ways to simplify what I think is most important as it relates to that particular team, or that particular kid,” Williams said.

  “I don’t explain to them, ‘You know when we do the shooting drills? Do you know how often somebody rebounds the ball, and then pitches it out to you to shoot it?” he added. “Like, they don’t get that that’s because the ball’s coming from in to out . . . All they get is, ‘Coach says our offense is red light, green light. The light is red until the ball touches the paint.’”

  That’s not to say that the talk topics are randomly selected. If the conversation is about taxes and other income deductions, Williams will use the context of salaries earned and tie them into a professional basketball context. Do you have an agent? Do you have a rep who landed you an endorsement deal? What are the different state tax rates or tax rates for Americans playing overseas? That helps teach his players that the same starting point ends up at decidedly different end points given the different paths you can choose.

  He also uses the conversations on brain structure to help him understand his players as much as he wants the players to learn more about themselves. A huge part of coaching is teaching, and just like a classroom instructor, Williams needs to understand his students and their specific needs. The best ways to learn vary from person to person, and Williams wants to figure out as early as possible how each of his players are wired, so he can understand who is compatible with whom and also which groups will take best to various types of instruction.

  “One of the Tech Talks is ‘How do you think?’ And I talk about left brain, right brain, and I do some things with them for them to understand which side are they,” Williams said. “And how we all have to honor everybody’s brain, because there’s no right answer, there’s no wrong answer, it’s just how we’re wired. And how you can be a great teammate, if you’re a right-brain thinker, to a left-brain thinker. Because some guys need to hear it. Then I start talking about ‘Are you a visual learner? Do you learn by hearing?’ And so I explain to them, ‘I can tell you what you guys are, but that’s my responsibility because I pay attention to everything. So when I’m coaching you, I know which ones of you hear what I’m saying and can digest it, and which ones of you need to be on the floor and walk through it to learn it.’

  “So, even when I say, ‘Andy, Buzz, John, Dick, and Harry, on the court, we’re walking through “23X,”’ that may not be the starters. That may not be the maroon team, that may not be the white team. That’s the team that I know needs to walk through 23X to absorb it. If you’re not on the floor, that’s because as I’m teaching and walking through 23X for these guys, I know you can listen and you can absorb it.”

  The absorbing is not just for the players, either. Williams makes sure he indoctrinates his staff in the language of utility for the Hokies, as well. Take assistant coach Jamie McNeilly, for example. He’s been with Williams ever since he was a player at the University of New Orleans, when Williams was the head coach there. Since then, McNeilly has moved with Williams to Marquette and now to Virginia Tech, but 2014 was the first summer that McNeilly was out on the road recruiting for Williams’s program.

  Williams said he told McNeilly that, as part of his daily work, he had to keep a diary on the road that included every single thing that popped into his head, no matter whether it was before, during, or after a game that a potential recruit was in, or not even at one of the myriad gyms coaches traipse in and out of all summer long.

  Williams would periodically connect with his newly blooded assistant on the road during that July period and would ask to examine the diary so he could see what McNeilly was thinking and also to make suggestions on what he should actually be observing. Late that summer, McNeilly was scouting wing Eli Wright, who ultimately committed to Mississippi State in August 2015, and noted in his Williams-provided old-school notepad that three of Wright’s first four baskets in that game had come when he had been fouled in the process of scoring—an “and-1” in hoops parlance.

  Williams latched onto that as a great example of how looking at things in a certain way, through an analytical lens, can benefit the staff, and in turn, benefit Virginia Tech’s players.

  “I’m like, ‘See, Jamie, that translates to us.’ Not, ‘He’s a good player,’ not, ‘He’s left-handed and I like left-handed guards,’” Williams said. “Not all of that. You can see that immediately. But what is it underneath all of that that translates to us? Well, if three out of his first four shots were and-1s, obviously I would think—I would bet—that those were paint touch shots? ‘Yes, sir, those were.’ I go, ‘But that’s what I’m saying. Nobody is going to say that. They’re going to say so-and-so recruited him, so-and-so offered him, this tweet that his team won, this tweet said something—none of that matters to us. It doesn’t matter to me.’

  “But, you take three out of his first four [baskets via and-1s], now all of a sudden when I have that conversation with the kid, I go, ‘Hey, man, let me talk to you about your game.’ And he’s like, ‘Wow, coach. I didn’t even know you was looking like that.’ I said, ‘No, I want you to understand that that’s how thin the line is, right? Because you have to [get to where] 25 percent of your points, if you’re a real player, come from the free throw line. . . . If you do that throughout your college career, I promise you’ll make more money than you’ve dreamed of.’

  In Williams’s first season in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech ended up finishing last again in the Atlantic Coast Conference, winning only two of eighteen games in the extremely competitive conference for the second straight season, but he isn’t deterred. He’s seen the benefits of his approach from his time at Marquette, where he inherited a successful program from Tom Crean, who moved to Indiana, and won at least twenty-two games in each of his first five seasons there. He is a true believer in stats, but an even bigger devotee to finding ever more creative ways in which to bridge his passion with his players’ ability to process the information. Those ideas—and those talks—are the building blocks, and nothing good can happen during the season if they’re not in place beforehand.

  “I think that as I’ve matured, and maybe as I’ve evolved as a coach, you have to find ways—not using the game—to teach them the values of numbers,” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Faster, Stronger, More Explosive

  It’s about faster, stronger, more explosive, all these types of things to optimize performance. We’re not just trying to avoid injuries; we’re trying to make them perform better on the court.

  —Adam Hewitt, assistant general manager, P3

  Santa Barbara, California, i
s one of the hidden gems of the West Coast, a tony, oceanfront community about ninety minutes northwest of Los Angeles up the Ventura Freeway. The drive through some of LA’s northern suburbs is nice enough, but improves dramatically when the highway runs through Ventura and then starts winding its way up the coast, with the Pacific Ocean lapping at the shore as stunning companionship.

  The city itself sits on the longest south-facing piece of shoreline on the entire West Coast, neatly tucked between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the water. Thanks to its moderate Mediterranean climate, its stunning location, and the number of major celebrities who own homes there, Santa Barbara has been referred to by the New York Times as “America’s Riviera.”

  You wouldn’t expect this vista to house one of the epicenters of cutting-edge professional sports diagnostics, but starting from Stearns Wharf, the main commercial pier that juts out temptingly into the ocean, you’re maybe half a mile from it by foot. Just walk several blocks down one of the nation’s most aesthetically pleasing fitness paths, cross E. Cabrillo Boulevard, continue across a set of railroad tracks, wind through a small garden and a parking area, and spill out onto the southern end of modest Santa Barbara Street. There, at the base of a developing, trendy warehouse area filling up with more scene-appropriate businesses like art shops and wine bars, sits a mostly nondescript, mostly one-room building. Inside is P3—the Peak Performance Project—one of pro basketball’s most important training and biometric testing facilities.

  P3 is the brainchild of Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained physician who has spent the last seventeen years working with world-class athletes, sports organizations, and franchises to help them maximize athletic performance while minimizing injury risk. At various points in his career, he has worked with sportsmen and women who were training at the US Olympic Training Center, the Australian Institute of Sport, and the Sports Science Institute of South Africa. He also has served as a physiologist and injury prevention specialist for the NFL’s New England Patriots, as the director of sports science for Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, and as an advisor to the NBA’s Utah Jazz, among numerous other consulting positions. On P3’s website, Mark McKown, the head strength and conditioning coach of the Jazz (the first NBA team to start sending its players to P3 in the middle of last decade), describes Elliott as “a true pioneer” who “has an eye and ability to pick up things and identify problems I’ve never seen anybody do.”

  The mission behind Elliott’s enterprise is to help athletes—specifically in basketball and baseball, although they are also looking to move further into international soccer—refine their physical movements in order to maximize their explosiveness in the core motions specific to their sport while also making sure their bodies move in ways that significantly reduce injury risk. They accomplish this, in part, by designing workout programs that promote uniform muscle balance and a reduction of the torque on joints that can eventually lead to damage.

  The inside of the facility is surprisingly normal looking given what happens there, at least on first glance. There’s a set of steps up to a nice, wood-floored waiting area with a couple of couches and a greeting desk. A nicely marbled one-person bathroom complete with a shower is off to the right, and modest offices tucked into the front right corner of the space. There are three flat-screen TVs high up on the right-side wall toward the back of the room.

  The main part of the training area is totally open aside from several floor-to-ceiling support beams running through the middle of it. There’s a three-lane, straight-line running track that starts near where the front door opens and extends along the full length of the left wall. In several corners are standing weight racks and rubberized weight plates for squats and other leg exercises. There are rolling bins full of weight balls of different sizes and hefts, along with red metal stools of various heights to be used for step-ups or as devices to jump on or over.

  Then you look a bit closer and see more sophisticated and unusual equipment. There are four-sided towers with various cables and other resistance bands. There are various angled and flat, laminated wood planks, designed for pushing off and sliding. Along the right side of the room toward the back, there is a cement brick wall to be used both for stretching and also to twist and hurl things into with significant force.

  A few steps away from that wall is where P3 truly separates itself from a normal workout facility. Inset in the floor sit two large, parallel, metal “force plates,” which essentially are sophisticated scales that can measure the amount of force and explosiveness created by athletes who jump on and off of them. Above the plates are numerous motion-sensing cameras that capture the movements as they happen, and feed the data into computers at a desk in the back right corner of the room. At that desk sit the company’s biomechanists, who store, translate, and interpret the data, creating living profiles of an athlete’s movements and performance. They also use the collective data to build trend profiles for various injuries and injury risk for each sport.

  On this particular sunny Monday morning in November 2014, half an hour before the facility officially opened for business, lightly bearded assistant general manager Adam Hewitt already was waiting in the main greeting area. Hewitt is in charge of day-to-day operations at the facility, managing the relationships between P3 and its clients, and also handling the company’s brand awareness. As the rest of the staff was busily prepping for the arrival of an NBA player and his team’s trainer at 9 a.m., Hewitt walked through the company’s philosophy and how P3 works with their range of clients at both the individual and team levels.

  “Everything is so tailored to the individual,” Hewitt said. “Our training programs, we definitely have a formula we like to follow, and there’s definitely a rationale for putting different types of movements together, and there are certain ways we like to progress things, but the heart of it is just finding exactly what each athlete needs, and giving them an exact prescription. Ultimately, nothing is generalized. Obviously, we’re not inventing new exercises for each guy—it’s stuff that’s been done before—but prescribe it.

  “If the guy is unbelievably sound and has great mechanics, it’s about optimizing power development and the movements of the sport,” he continued. “It’s about faster, stronger, more explosive, all these types of things to optimize performance. We’re not just trying to avoid injuries; we’re trying to make them perform better on the court. Jump a little higher, run a little quicker, accelerate a little faster, change direction more efficiently. And it goes hand in hand. The guys with the best mechanics tend to move a little more quickly, but there are some guys with horrible mechanics that are able to figure it out on the court because they are special athletes and they have an unbelievable nervous system and all these fast-twitch muscles. But at the same time, one little glitch can throw everything off.”

  Hewitt explained that athletes and team strength coaches will spend time at P3 conducting initial workout assessments, and then P3 will put together summaries for the teams that highlight the athletes’ biggest primary needs. Those summaries include the testing results and specific rationale as to why particular issues were flagged, and what could happen if they’re not fixed. Then P3 plies the strength coaches with corrective strategies and specific exercises the athlete needs to train themselves out of the current harmful pattern.

  On this morning, the NBA player (who is recovering from an injury) was coming in for a follow-up assessment, so we headed back to the biometric testing area, where two of the company’s biomechanists were preparing. One of them was Stanford-educated Eric Leidersdorf, who was helping lead P3’s efforts in data analysis and bigger-picture trend identification. As P3’s player database continues to grow, the company can get more accurate interpretations of risk ranges and what types of muscle imbalances lead to what kinds of injuries with what kind of frequency.

  For the force plate testing, Leidersdorf explained that the technicians place around two dozen reflective dots, or “markers,” on various anatomic
al landmarks on the athlete’s body. These dots reflect light back to the cameras, which then feed that motion data into the computer. The technicians then go back and identify each segment of data and link it to a specific body part—left knee, right ankle, and so forth—and from that can generate a skeleton on screen that displays the movements of the athlete as well as the various levels of force generated and the discrepancies between the player’s left and right sides.

  “We can replicate exactly what their bodies are doing when they go through these movements,” Leidersdorf said. “What the force plates allow us to do is look at things beyond how high a guy jumps. [Vertical leap has] been done at the [NBA Draft] Combine for however long they’ve done it, but what this allows us to look at is rates of force development.”

  As an example, he pulled up an anonymous NBA player’s file on the computer monitor and showed the skeleton going through the movements of when the player did a “drop jump”—a drill where the player starts on an eighteen-inch-high box, drops onto the force plates, and then immediately jumps as high as he can vertically. The drill is somewhat akin to the experience of making a second jump for a rebound, and tries to isolate the kind of dynamic muscle systems that would be used in basketball games.

  Leidersdorf then pointed to two colored lines on the screen, which corresponded to the data being fed back from the cameras. In this particular player’s case, there was roughly a 20 percent discrepancy between the force generated by his left and right legs during that test drill. That was almost double the average differential that P3 sees in athletes in this drill, and was an initial sign that there may be a problem brewing.