Data-Driven Recruiting & Building an Elite Basketball Team

Chris Kiefer (00:00.662)

Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. Today, I'm super pumped. For those of you that have listened to the last couple, you notice I'm going on a little theme here. I'm interviewing past teammates. I don't know if you saw Dan, but I interviewed Jordan Reyes a couple episodes ago. And so anyways, we're back. I've got Dan Pearson. Dan, thanks so much for coming on.

Dan Pearson (00:15.133)

Not yet. Okay.

Dan Pearson (00:22.599)

Chris? Yeah, thanks for having me, man.

Chris Kiefer (00:25.058)

And Dan and I played at Carroll, and we were also the only basketball players that were also peer ministers as well. So we had that in common at Carroll College.

Dan Pearson (00:36.513)

and also Vice President and President of Student's Student Baccalaureate.

Chris Kiefer (00:40.526)

Yes, and so, so our, our senior year, Dan and I were president, I was president, he was vice president, peer ministers, I was no longer playing basketball at that time. Were you still on the team? You've been abandoned as well? Yeah. That's a separate story. What we're here to talk about today is Dan is now watching. I'll let him describe. I know he's coaching professional basketball in Europe right now, but he has just been

Dan Pearson (00:55.771)

No, I was done to your part.

Chris Kiefer (01:10.558)

Someone that I always respected from like a, as someone that has their values in line, faithful person, man of integrity, super, super talented basketball player. And he's just taking all of his great liberal arts education from Carroll College and applying it in some really remarkable ways. Like genuinely, when we were talking about prepping for this, I'm like so stoked for this, cause I had no idea that Dan and I have like this new.

like related, like, you know, we're president, vice president, peer minister, basketball players, and now we're data nerds as well. So we'll let you explain more of that, but Dan, give us like a 90 second bio, who's Dan Pearson, what are you doing now, and where are you headed?

Dan Pearson (01:55.377)

Yeah. Well, I mean, like you said, originally from Montana, um, went to Billing Central Catholic High School and then over to Carroll College and was there for five years and, uh, played with you. I was there for playing for four years and then got in my, my undergraduate was education. And so I taught for a year and then got hired on at, uh, at Carroll pretty much full time for three years as the men's assistant basketball coach there went up to Canada and then three years ago made my way over, um, to Europe. So

in between. Yep, we did. We had set a couple records. We pretty significant win streak in Canada West and made it back to back national championship games. In that stretch, I ended up getting my masters from Gonzaga, so your neck of the woods, and organizational leadership, servant leadership. So it kind of instilled a little bit of a business side of things for me that hadn't shown up in anything else I was doing. And so a lot of the stuff I think we're talking

Chris Kiefer (02:25.462)

won a national championship in Canada, right?

Dan Pearson (02:54.877)

really kind of has its roots in what I got out of Gonzaga. But yeah, it was over in Europe, came over to England just outside London for a team called the Redding Rockets three years ago for my first head coaching gig for a lot of different reasons. A little bit of a move up the ladder, moved to Germany last year as an assistant for a team that had just moved down from the Bundesliga. And then this year got a head coaching job at, and this is terrible because I continue to mispronounce the name, but team.

Fog, Nesville in the top Danish basketball league. So, yeah, that's kind of been the runabout for the last couple of years.

Chris Kiefer (03:30.123)

That's awesome.

Chris Kiefer (03:35.326)

So I have to, I guess I wanna jump straight into, Dan is approaching recruiting. I think maybe, just give some context of like, I'm a basketball player. I know, I'll tell you my understanding, which I'm hoping is similar to where a listener might be, but in America, we've got the NBA. It's a pretty big deal, best basketball in the world, but the feeding of the players that come to the NBA, you've got like.

your D1 athletes that everybody knows, the household names, they're getting drafted in the first couple of rounds. My understanding is that if you're a great basketball player, but not quite at the level to be drafted directly, there's this other route that many people take where they go play professionally in Europe for one year, two years, five years, 10 years, with the hope, or I'm assuming that the hope is that, like for the serious basketball players, they're hoping that they can either.

jump to a bigger program or potentially actually get drafted by a team later and then end up getting back to the NBA. Is that correct or is there a different route?

Dan Pearson (04:39.253)

Yeah, I mean, there's some nuance there. I mean, I think, I don't know, we just got done kind of with our, um, our preseason surveys and, um, meetings with all of our guys. And when we looked at their like meta goals, none of them said NBA, but all of them said to some extent wanting to carve out a career professionally here. So, um, actually I just got back from visiting one of my old players in Germany who moved to another club and his, his first team ever was here in

Dan Pearson (05:09.409)

He's been in Spain, the German top league for 10 years. And basically between him and his family now, they're gonna be able to retire on the money that he's done. So a lot of guys will try to kind of take that route because there's some good money in Europe. Where we're at is a little bit of an interesting little feeder league because it's not high paid, but it's got a really good jumping off point. So a lot of the players that have been here in the last couple of years, they come here, they do well. And then in a lot of ways, it's kind of like a little bit of a Juco system.

in some sense, I don't know, I don't want to like, delegitimize it in that sense, but just guys come here for one or two years, try to do well.

Chris Kiefer (05:44.702)

And when you say come here, you mean to your team or your league?

Dan Pearson (05:48.289)

To our league, we've been one of the bigger feeders. There's a club that plays kind of on the top Euro league in our league as well called the Boccan Bears. And so like they would pull some really heavy hitters out of the college ranks. But we've basically decided to go with just like high level college seniors and then guys that are like one or two years out. So, I mean, we're looking at starters from like Georgetown and Wake Forest and George Mason.

player of the year out of out of some of the smaller conferences. So really good players but they're all like in the process of just starting out their career. So young guys which in itself is unique because when a player comes from one of these high-level colleges they're walking over with someone telling them like a script for every single thing they do in the day. You show up, you eat this, you lift this, you run here and now they're walking over to Europe and I just don't have a staff or something like that and so for young guys there's a...

There's a level of professionalism that we talk about a ton where sometimes at practice, it's just me. And so if I need somebody else to manage the technical side of things, I have to look to them and say like, you're a pro now. Like when I was, when I was in England, we had, we had two players who were 34 and 35 get into a fight at practice. And I was 31 at that time. And they looked at me to resolve it. And I said, you guys resolve it. You're older than me. And so like, there's this element of, of professionalism that steps into it where

Chris Kiefer (07:10.81)

Hahaha

Dan Pearson (07:15.973)

I'm more a collaborator in a lot of ways when at the university level you are like the adult in the room where it's a shift in that sense, which is really fun. And the relational side of it is different, but it's still like very much a point. I know we're going to talk about that one a little bit later, but so yeah, it's been an interesting go for the last couple of years.

Chris Kiefer (07:23.342)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (07:34.39)

So then from where you're at now in the new team, you are getting players primarily from American universities. And then the pitch to them is, cause they're like, I love basketball, don't really want to just get a job yet. Maybe there's a future here, maybe not, but I've got an opportunity to play overseas potentially. And so they're shopping around, maybe they're getting a couple scouts to pitch them some contracts or whatnot.

And what is your pitch to a guy that's debating on your team versus someone else?

Dan Pearson (08:09.105)

Well, we got really lucky. So like you and I were kind of sharing some stuff back and forth and you know, at the beginning of the recruiting process, and then we'll talk a little bit about that process, we built out a really large list of players and that list expanded and changed throughout the two month recruiting window. But for the most part, we got the guys that we wanted to get which for us was really fortunate because sometimes you're kind of swinging for the fence to see what comes out and I just think that.

we got some of the guys we wanted. The pitch that made it useful on our end was a couple things. One, you can come over and there's a lot of these mid-tier leagues. The element of those mid-tier leagues is you're gonna pick your poise in some place. So some places you're gonna get paid more. But you might be in the backwoods of a country that you're the only person who speaks the language or speaks English and you're just there to show up, go to the gym, go back to your apartment.

And then there is genuinely a major cultural difference. We had last year, I was coaching with three different head coaches because of some firings and one was a German guy, completely different than a Lithuanian guy, completely different than the other American guy. And if you're an American kid coming over and you meet a sharp tongue Lithuanian who just does not care about you personally, not to say that's always the case, but in this situation, it just, that wasn't his focus. He didn't care about what was happening at home.

And you just came from a, you know, a, a division one program where you had 12 staff members coddling all the time. Sometimes it's really tough. So for me, I pitched the fact that you have an American coach with a team that's predominantly Americans and I'm coming from an area that they're coming from. I understand where they want to go. I can kind of relate. And so that, that helped a lot. The other thing was, is I was down in Vegas doing a lot of recruiting. So a lot of these guys, agents, we, we spent time together. And so they got to know me.

on that front. And so, and then I treated this genuinely like recruiting out of college. So I was on the phone with all of these guys. And so some of the big ones that we hit, like I legitimately treated it in the same way that I treated calling an 18 year old trying to get to, I was on the phone with moms and dads. And I think at this level, that doesn't happen most frequently. It's just like, you call the agent and maybe, maybe you call the player once. But for me, I just, I wanted to treat it from that side. And I think that

Dan Pearson (10:36.241)

set a few guys at ease. So we got the guys we wanted. We started the season out pretty well. We're 2-0 and had a really, really good preseason. So a lot of work still to be done, but I think on that track.

Chris Kiefer (10:46.838)

This is in the 2023 season, 2023-24 season. You guys are 2-0 so far. And this is in conference play.

Dan Pearson (10:54.738)

So far, yep. Yep, and we had four preseason games against Danish teams, all of them roughly 30 point wins. So I mean, we started well, we're super talented, but that also comes with some shadows, and of course that's some stuff that's interesting to talk about as well. But yeah, we got the guys we wanted, and I think a lot of it was just a recruitment process that's unique.

Chris Kiefer (11:18.142)

Yeah, so let's get into that. You had sent over kind of your notes on how you're doing this. I would say what I want to talk about is like, you identified, this is again, my perception is, you identified what type of team you're trying to put together first. So you have a vision of, we're gonna play faster pace, a lot of transition points, and you can fill in the color of what your vision of a team is. And then you acquired

stats from all these different players, and then you were ranking and aggregating different key statistics to try and essentially, and this is my assumption, you've got, let's say you've got a list of 150 players or 200 or whatever the number is, you can't have hour long conversations with 150 players. You need to whittle that down to the 15 or the 20 that you're gonna put effort into. It's like a, I almost was gonna say it's like a marketing funnel, right? You've got your funnel at the top, and how do I?

Dan Pearson (12:14.098)

Absolutely.

Chris Kiefer (12:16.982)

direct my energy and time towards the ones that are most likely a good fit, and then have the output be what, 12 or 13? How many, what's the total roster size?

Dan Pearson (12:27.089)

We've got nine imports. So we got nine imports, three Danes. Or Danes, yeah, three Danes, so.

Chris Kiefer (12:29.41)

Okay.

And technically, so the last question before you get into this is that is the un the thing that's not similar to college is that it's not like you've got classes that are going to age out or their eligibility is up. Someone could play for you for 10 years if they wanted to. Right.

Dan Pearson (12:48.469)

Yeah, and I don't, you know, and that's, I mean, for me personally, this is one of the hardest things about this particular job, because that's not the goal. And that's so awkward for me, because on every university recruitment, or every university job application that I've been a part of, my selling card has always been my retention rate, because getting guys, keeping guys, graduating guys, and so that's where the relationship comes. And that's just not the goal here. Our goal is to get-

Chris Kiefer (13:16.258)

The goal is stepping stone to where you want to be. Yeah.

Dan Pearson (13:19.065)

Find a way for us to be mutually successful win, but then also get you out of here And so if I do my job this year, I don't coach any of these guys next year And that's tough because like from someone who's relational it's just that it feels transactional So you have to find a way to kind of be transactional While like pouring into the relationship, which you know, that's just a day-to-day process But yeah

Chris Kiefer (13:28.398)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (13:44.982)

So yeah, let's start in with what type of team were you trying to build, and then what were the key metrics that you were focusing on? And then for the listeners, ChatGPT is gonna come into this, some spreadsheets. He's got a pretty cool process. So let's talk about what were you trying to put together from a high level, and then what did you start looking at?

Dan Pearson (13:50.866)

Yeah.

Dan Pearson (14:05.425)

Well, and I think you're right that this definitely took on like a business format. Um, there was, there was me trying to steal as much as I could from different people that I've read about from a completely different field of mine. And so this was the, the data collection was for me, the starting point. So what I do after every season that I get done, I do what I consider a year end audit of the leagues. So like last year I did for the German pro a league. So the team just down from the Bundesliga.

I did a collective audit and I collected probably what would have been 30 to 35 different Statistical categories and I did it for the entire league and so from that point forward once I had all that all those numbers I took the top four teams in this in the league and I pulled out the areas that they were all in the upper half of the league on all right So basically was the top four teams were all consistently good at these things and what we were able to pull out was

three major components that they were just simply better than everybody else at. And the three major keys were pace, possessions, and efficiency. Now, some of those things are no brainers. Like when you talk about efficiency in basketball, that means you score the ball more than you don't score the ball. It's like a baseball hitter hits the ball more than he doesn't hit the ball. The pace was obviously something that, some teams say like, they just want to strategically play slow. Some teams say they want to play really fast.

But we found that the teams that were successful as a whole played really, really fast. And then they won extra possessions. And so the nice thing about something like possessions, and we were talking a little bit about the movie Moneyball, so for people who've seen that, there's a great scene where Brad Pitt's character is sitting in the scouting room with all the old heads, and they're talking about Giambi's brother and his issues.

And he keeps coming back to this one component. He just says, but he gets on base. He points to Jonah Hill and he says, he gets on base. So for us, what we created was a spreadsheet that looked at all these things. So what was their pace? You could look at that from synergy to look at their transition numbers. Um, what was their efficiency? Super easy to see, uh, either your field goal percent, but there's some better ones, so points per possession. And we added plus efficiency or plus assist. So that was the, we call it the Draymond green stat, um, because it's something that what you're

Chris Kiefer (16:28.8)

Mmm.

Dan Pearson (16:29.701)

once you throw that in there, it goes from someone being an okay offensive player, maybe a bad offensive player to an elite one. But then the final one, and this was my get on base stat was possessions. Does this person get more possessions? So like one of our guys, Robin Duncan, who was top of my list, he was creating almost 3.2, I believe, extra possessions per game. So if you imagine, and this is an impossibility, but if every single one of your players created 3.2 extra possessions and you played

Chris Kiefer (16:36.142)

Hmm.

Dan Pearson (16:59.634)

players, you would have 32 more possessions in the opposition.

Chris Kiefer (17:03.266)

So before you come back to that, I was looking at this stat before and I'm like feeling like an idiot because I play basketball. How do I get more possessions? Because I can't get another possession unless the other team has a possession.

Dan Pearson (17:15.348)

Yeah, great. So that is actually, it's funny, and good for you to for catching that. It's just a language thing. So technically we have the same amount of possessions. However, it sounds funny to say field goal attempted possessions. That just doesn't roll off the tongue very well. So if.

Chris Kiefer (17:30.902)

Ah, okay. So it's a possession where you got a shot at the goal.

Dan Pearson (17:34.657)

Yeah, so it's like if you turn the ball over you didn't get a field goal attempt. If I get an offensive rebound, I got the ball back and in theory I'm getting an offensive rebound. Or I'm getting a field goal attempt as well. The other thing is if you get fouled that one won't go into an a field goal attempt but if you have 10 free throws throughout the game you can count that as roughly five extra possessions because a possession with a foul generally in the Fever world is two.

Chris Kiefer (17:39.331)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (18:00.034)

Got it, okay. So it's the extra possessions come from offensive rebounds, deflections or steals, and then the third one would be.

Dan Pearson (18:06.165)

steals. Yep. And we gave half to block shots because and that's a that was kind of arbitrary. There's not like actual hard data to it. But if you suggest that half of those block shots are negating a possession or a field goal attack and then maybe half of those go out of bounds or half of those go on and then you do all those ones and you subtract it by your turnovers. So if you were someone who doesn't turn the ball over but you got a lot of offensive rebounds and you had a lot of turn or steals.

Chris Kiefer (18:22.902)

Yeah.

Dan Pearson (18:35.037)

then you were a high possession guy. And so we ran the numbers looking at, and this one we don't have time, or to be honest, I probably don't have the capacity to explain it. But basically, if you were an inefficient player but you create a lot more possessions, your efficiency actually goes up because efficiency is, the reason why we call it points per possession versus field goal percentage is because each possession actually matters. And so if you're a less efficient scorer but you get more possessions,

you're actually collectively putting more points in the bucket. And that's what really matters. So.

Chris Kiefer (19:08.406)

Got it. And the other thing is that the different, the better thing of looking at points per possession as opposed to just field goal is that you got threes and twos and ones. You need to make sure that your overall, how many points do we get for the number of possessions that we got in the game, and that's how you win.

Dan Pearson (19:22.737)

So that's basically for us our three key stats that we look at we talked about at a halftime we talked about after every single game was what's our pace we want to be above 90 our last game we had 109 possessions which is insane like just are on those ones.

Chris Kiefer (19:37.93)

And are you defining that stat, the pace, same way you're defining the other possessions? So attempted field goal possessions. Okay.

Dan Pearson (19:45.494)

Yes, yes, that one is there's actually a pace statistic. I just don't have the manpower to pull that one out. So we set a line. So at least we have a goal to chase after. We want plus 10 possessions, field goal attempted possessions from our opposition. And like, for instance, the last one, I think we were plus 24, which is again, those if you have 24 more field goal attempts than the opposition, you're just not losing those games. You'd have to play so bad offensively to do that.

Even in that game, we were, I think we scored 65 points in the first half and then we scored eight points in the third quarter because we got sleepy. So we were very inefficient by the end of that game, yet because we had so many more possessions, it didn't really matter. So that was basically our big three. And then the final thing that I pulled out from the German audit, and this stays pretty consistent, was you end up having a way of scoring. So on synergy, for instance, and that's where I get most of my statistics.

Chris Kiefer (20:27.171)

Hmm

Dan Pearson (20:42.857)

There's certain shot types that are super efficient. So like for instance, cutting off the ball. If you back cut and you score a layup, it's gonna be a very efficient way of scoring. The opposite end of that is isolation. So if I play a lot of isolation basketball, its efficiency is down around like 0.72, whereas cutting's up above 1.2. So I created a rank order of the type of shot types that were averaged out. And this is consistent through every single league. So the numbers, what exactly they are,

are going to shift, but the rank order is pretty much consistent. And so we went after players that put a high emphasis on the high efficiency stats and were very low in their usage rates for like things like offense or for isolation. And then on the other side of the ball, what we try to do is build a roster. And so we're pretty much, we got one kid or guy who's six, one, everyone else is six foot four to six foot eight. And so for us, what we decide is that means that we can pressure in the full court so everyone can move.

we can rebound and so we're crashing the glass. But then we're gonna switch a lot of ball screens and stuff because we're trying to force teams into more isolation possessions. So, offensively we're working up the ladder, offensively working down the ladder. And so when we built our roster, like the one that I sent you over, we looked at every single bit of data. There were certain guys that I immediately eliminated because they were like 17% of their offensive possessions were isolation. I just go, that's not the type of team I wanna build. So.

Chris Kiefer (21:50.668)

Mm.

Chris Kiefer (22:09.108)

Hmm.

Dan Pearson (22:09.901)

It started out basically data collection and then created a vision and then you just went and tried to get as many people as you could That fit into that one and then scraped off the top So we just went for this guy first when he said no we went to this guy next when he said no We went to this guy next and just worked yourself down Until we got the roster that we wanted

Chris Kiefer (22:29.522)

And then so if you're going after your, are you not, are you trying to get like three point guards, three wings, like is that in there also? Or are you just like, we're getting like kind of a positionless team and we're gonna put it together when they get here.

Dan Pearson (22:44.177)

A little bit. So I think one of the major errors that we made last year in Germany was we didn't submit to trade offs. So you say you want to play fast. Like and this was the conversation that I had early off when I showed up to the club. I was like, so what would want to be like, oh, we want to be we want to be fast and we want to be big. And we want to be. Yeah, well, it was like, but the thing is, is that everyone then wants Kevin Durant, you know, and just go, but Kevin Durant's not showing up to this. So you so you have to do trade offs. And so what I put at the end of the audit was

Chris Kiefer (23:00.77)

but we need four big men.

Dan Pearson (23:15.438)

If you looked at speed and size as evolutionary trade-offs, you basically are saying, I'm going to give up maybe some speed to get some size. So I might go for a slower point guard if he's a bigger point guard. I might give up some size if I can get some speed back. So instead of having a seven footer, I might go for a six eight big because I can't get a seven foot big who's also mobile.

or else he's probably bad at something else. So it was us picking our trade-offs. So we went for bigger, slower guards, slower guards, our guards are still pretty mobile, bigger, slower guards, and we went for shorter, faster bigs. And so it was just simply submitting. And like, for instance, we don't have any traditional bigs, like back to the basket post-up players, but we have three guys who can defend in the full court and shoot threes. And so again, it was just one of those things where it was like, I knew I wasn't going to get, there's a saying, it's a,

You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. And so it was just like, pick your poison on what you're gonna get. And for me, one of the things was, is we don't have a quote unquote traditional point guard. And I have zero, that doesn't bother me at all. Because when I built my offensive system, my offensive system is not a set heavy position or a set heavy system. And so for people who don't know anything about basketball, basically that means you're not going down, yeah, you're not running like a play. You're not like hiking the football and this guy's going here and there.

Chris Kiefer (24:35.819)

Not a lot of plays.

Dan Pearson (24:41.509)

We do everything that flows out of transition. So anyone can run that and it's not important that you have a squirrely little point guard who can handle the ball at the top of the key. So we just knew that was when we were gonna pick what things we wanted to trade off on and what things we were willing to go without. We just put them on the board and we said, that's fine. We are okay with not having these things. We need to have these things. So like for us again, rebounding, every single one of our players, maybe one is an elite rebounder.

The only division two player we have on the team averaged 13 rebounds a game as a six four guard. You know, so that's the thing is I just, I knew he was going to be an elite rebounder, but he was gonna give up some other things. And I was okay with giving those things up, so.

Chris Kiefer (25:16.354)

Wow.

Chris Kiefer (25:24.958)

Yeah, yeah. So, one thing, you mentioned synergy a couple times. This is a unanimously used software or something that all American colleges put their stats into.

Dan Pearson (25:36.253)

Yeah, there's synergy and instad are kind of the two global big ones. And it is, if you ever watch ESPN and someone gives you like the deep data, that is where everything comes off of. And it's also your film. So if I wanted to watch just, if we had, I actually think our final year at Carol, they might've just started doing it. Um, but if I wanted just to watch Chris Kiefer on the left side of the court in a pick and roll when the team went under, um, I can watch.

Chris Kiefer (26:03.606)

It has that.

Dan Pearson (26:04.889)

I could watch just those clips and I could also see how efficient you were in those scenarios.

Chris Kiefer (26:11.476)

And is this AI assisting with that now, or it's all manually people are logging?

Dan Pearson (26:18.074)

I'm sure they'll go that way, but it's a clipping format and they hire people out. But I'm sure that they're in the process of figuring out how to get AI to do more and more.

Chris Kiefer (26:29.618)

Yeah, so do you on your end, you see you create all this, you are extracting the, and this went up, spent a ton of time on it, but I just thought this was interesting. How are you getting these data sets into Excel? You said you use chat GPT to do that. What's like the 60 second thing on, cause that seems like some ingenuity of like leveraging some something that an older guy that doesn't know what the internet is probably isn't gonna do.

Dan Pearson (26:45.075)

Yeah.

Dan Pearson (26:56.141)

Yeah, so basically I broke the NCAA leagues out by kind of their rankings. So you took the Power 5 rankings, the Big 10, ACC, SEC, Pac-12, all those ones I knew I wasn't getting any starters. There just wasn't. Well, actually, that's not even true because I ended up getting two starters out of the ACC. But that wasn't my initial space I swung out.

For those guys, I basically went and asked ChatGBT to grab me every graduating senior between 6'4 and 6'8 that played anywhere between 10 and 25 minutes. And so it ends up, now it's a very brief version of how I would do it. I had to prompt it quite a bit to give me those things. And then as I went to the lower leagues, I would go first and foremost to conference award winners. So if you were first team all conference, second team all conference, or third team all conference.

Same thing, there's a website called Eurobasket that basically holds onto all these things. So I prompted ChatGPT giving it that to pull that data set out. It gave me URLs for each player and then I refed those URLs back in and asked for it to create grids for me with all that data. Once I had that data, most of it I had to go check because ChatGPT, yes, it still hallucinates a little bit. It gets fatigued actually, which was funny.

Chris Kiefer (28:13.802)

Make sure it's right. Yeah.

Dan Pearson (28:17.873)

is that the first five or six searches, it'll nail it. And then once it gets to seven, I have to close it and restart it and get a new bot that was less tired. But anyway, so I used that just so I didn't have to type everything out and go and like, yeah. And so it...

Chris Kiefer (28:18.498)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (28:24.095)

Interesting.

Chris Kiefer (28:32.738)

Totally, yeah. And you were just doing it to acquire the data set so that you can then do the stuff you just explained.

Dan Pearson (28:37.477)

Yeah. And then one of my best friends, good, you know, someone that you know pretty well, Phil Barnt, um, him and I sat down in the beginning of summer and we took all the data and we built a bit of an algorithm to give a ranking score. And then the Excel just popped out a ranking score tops all the way down. Um, and then from there it went into the personal side. So it was calling them looking at their social media, you know, giving points of reference between agents and old coaches. And so that was just the

you know, that was just the whittling down of thousands of people into what became about 110. Um, and then you had to go and make sure that they were decent humans.

Chris Kiefer (29:18.342)

Okay, so I got like a next tier, or like a more higher level strategy. This is where my head goes with this. So it takes time at the end of the year. You gotta wait for the season to end to see who got the awards, who won, where people kind of shook out. And to now say the season ends, March or April 1st, you can start putting all this stuff together or whatever the date is, right?

Now you've got, it's just a running clock. So the longer it takes you to compile the data set and put all those pieces together, that time is you're losing potentially the guy that you could go get because you knew on the day after the season was over, if it were possible. I've got my list of 20 guys I'm gonna start calling literally a day after the season ends. I don't know how long it took you to put all this together, but I'm assuming it was a month or something.

and now you're a month behind, but with a better strategy. So my thought is, how do you shrink that to days instead of weeks?

Dan Pearson (30:25.961)

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think one thing for us is that our season ends like two months after the college system. So like we are like in our own weeds until that's done. The other thing is, is I know I'm not the prettiest girl at the dance. And so there's a lot of people here that they need to go through. Some of the best players that we got, we got really late in the recruitment process because they were just going and talking. And so there's a handful of guys that have

Chris Kiefer (30:51.35)

down the list of everybody else first. Yeah.

Dan Pearson (30:55.645)

we would have no business getting. Now, probably my four, the guys that I think are probably the most important to us, and I wouldn't say that they're the most talented players, those ones were the diamonds in the rough. And that's what I think you're talking about. There are certain guys, the E.J. Danberville's for us, Robin Duncan, Gus Okafer, those type of guys, they are overlooked for certain reasons, and the first person who calls and says, hey, I see something in you, it's just like other forms of recruiting. So that's where you're correct on that.

Um, you know, if, if I could get to a place where I could automize, automate, um, some, some form of getting that data, that's just kind of a running data. Um, I think that's a no brainer to just basically have that same Excel that I built just auto populate. I just, I mean, if you've got some ideas for it, let me know. But, um, hopefully that, uh,

Chris Kiefer (31:49.226)

Well, what I was gonna, so I was gonna say, I don't have anything off the top, but I was gonna say, so there's that. But then the other thing I'm thinking is like, what could you do from like a personal branding side that people are just like, oh, I know all about you. I've heard, whatever, like what else can you bring? It's like, I'm just gonna use the over exaggeration of Coach K, right? He's Coach K because he was at a number one school.

But how can you like try to build that so when you call somebody, there's a higher chance that there is awareness of you or they do some quick Google searching of who's this Dan guy and it's like, that's the guy I wanna play for. Like, are you doing that at all? Or is that not really a factor yet?

Dan Pearson (32:39.257)

So this is also super interesting because to me this is back into the kind of the business side of things which I found Unique for me last season. I would say for a couple different reasons around November last year I knew I wasn't gonna be back in Germany and there was just or at least I was gonna be back with Jena and so I Was kind of hitting a little bit of the panic button because I wouldn't say I'm not networked the networks I have are like deep intimate relationships, but it wasn't broad

And it was partially because I saw that kind of as a dirty word of being like, be that guy who cold calls a coach and like, Hey coach, can I, I'd love to come and introduce myself. And I didn't get a good feel for that. And it was about November last year that I realized that I can spend all this time carving out these other components of my career and try to develop in different ways. But if I'm not a good networker and if I can't figure out a way to do that, that's actually at the core of who I am as a person, then I I'm going to kind of limit my ceiling.

So I really started pouring in and it was just though. I'll tell you this story I was one of my old players the one I was down at Germany seen last year 16 year pro I called him I was like man listen I just set me down blind to one guy so he gives me this dude that he knew for the last several years He gives me a call to this other guy named Sam Sam's a scout someplace Sam and I are on the phone for an hour He's given me ten other people to talk to

and I'm in Vegas this summer at the summer league and I'm with a couple agents and we're in one of the casinos late at night and we've just kind of gone from agent party to agent party talking nerdy basketball stuff. And this guy sits down next to me and introduced himself to me. And I was like, looked over him, I was like, is your name Sam? And he's like, yeah. I was like, you and I had a 90 minute conversation on the phone like two weeks ago. And then we just have been chatting nonstop. The reason why I say that was because

this summer was the best networking kind of branch out that I've ever had. And the reason why that's important to your question is because you get to a place where you can get to understand and know the scouts and the agents well. So if you have good relationship with them, if their players come to you, I have three of my best players all come from one agent. He's a young guy and somehow he's gotten his hands on some elite players. If I treat them well, if I'm successful, if I have a good relationship with him.

Dan Pearson (35:04.445)

he will continue to send people to me because he knows he can trust me. And it's the same thing. If he keeps sending me good players that are actually good character guys, then I'm gonna keep going back to him. And so it is one of those things where success breeds success in that sense, but also the caliber of my recruitment and my networking with certain types of people is super, super important. So every single day I'm sending messages to these agents and I talk to them right now like a...

Chris Kiefer (35:18.659)

Hmm.

Dan Pearson (35:32.565)

parents of these kids or these players. And so that's one of those ways because, you know, the guy that's the sixth man at NC State right now, he does not care about me in Fog Nesbill. Now, he might get himself Matt Slann as an agent. And the minute that Matt Slann, you know, wants to say, hey, I got someone who you can trust in your first year, this is your person, that's probably the best bet for me.

Chris Kiefer (35:34.784)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (35:59.582)

Yeah, because I'm just thinking, I mean, immediately where my head goes is this, like I actually just posted an episode on podcasting and I feel like literally every conversation that you have with any, any rep or any scout, like see if they're interested in just having the conversation on a podcast. That's just because like, why not? It's super easy, but now you've got, you're at least moving the needle in that direction. But I also like,

Dan Pearson (36:19.378)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (36:28.094)

Obviously there's certain things that you whatever there's just there's ways to distill all that out. I'm curious where in your day What is like if you were to make like a pie chart of what is consuming the most amount of your time? Like and as far as like your coaching slash networking slash. I don't even know what else would be emailing people or planning your practices or travel like where

Where, give me like the top three things that you spend most of your time doing.

Dan Pearson (36:58.813)

You know, probably the number one thing for me, and this is something that, like I've had people who've been like, oh, it's really difficult to be a coach and a father. You know, it's really difficult to be a coach and a husband. And I kind of understood that, and then I kind of didn't. There's a part of me that's like, can you do this right? I think you can be super efficient with your time. And so what I've, about three years ago, started pouring into is I have a program that I use called XPS. And what XPS is essentially a video portfolio system for me.

And so I put all of my drills, if I have offensive or defensive actions that I like, I put it in there. If I do film work with players and we're teaching somebody how to, you know, trap in the full court and rotate on the backside, when I put it, I organize it there so that I can replicate that. And so when I, for instance, now, when I do my practice plans, I can just go in there and drag and drop it's function that way. And during COVID, I basically started pouring like five hours a day into that.

So now there's, I have like 5,000 videos in there. All of my drills are detailed. So if I send them to anybody or my players, so my players can see our practice plans before it. And every coaching point that I will have for those drills are already in there and they can see it on their phone. And that's something that I've kind of become obsessed with. And the biggest reason is one, it's my form of note taking. But two, you know.

I'm at some point maybe gonna be a father of three and have to run home and walk the dog. And so the efficiency that I have in terms of preparing will come down to the work I do today. And so if I can get ahead of that stuff now, so that is that process, whether it's the film process, whether it's review of practices, clipping things out, that probably takes up the most of my day. The next thing I would say is I'd spend

Chris Kiefer (38:36.046)

Totally.

Dan Pearson (38:53.061)

an absurd amount of time watching film and clipping videos. I'm sick of iMovie, but it's not just the product, just looking and clipping and moving things around because I'm sending out six different scout videos to players every single week. And so the video organization side of things and I don't know, maybe third would say, obviously we practice about twice a day, not every day.

So I'm on the court for four hours a day. So.

Chris Kiefer (39:25.106)

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm thinking that I'm just I always am trying to relate back to business. But this something that I'm personally obsessed with is this buy back your time principle. So a book, I don't know if you've read it or if you heard me talk about it. But Dan Martel wrote. Yeah, have you read it yet? Yeah, so I would I would say I would be curious for like, obviously, the thing that's interesting is that there is a like you

Dan Pearson (39:40.109)

time. Yeah.

No, but I heard you speak about it the other day.

Chris Kiefer (39:54.158)

personally putting your eyes on film over and over and over again, you're just developing the sixth sense of being able to look at a game and understand it at a much deeper level. So there's value there, but then there's other things like, when you record a drill, everything after the moment of the video being recorded, to me, that's like, okay, that could be outsourced. But I just, that's where my head goes, is like.

Literally, how do you buy back minutes or hours of these very repetitive things that you're doing to allow you to either focus time on family or the stuff that is 10X more valuable for Dan personally to be doing, which in the scouting season would be that, obviously. But yeah.

Dan Pearson (40:41.885)

Well, one of the things, and we talk about this from a basketball front, is we talk about scaling. So we want things that scale. I think it's the same thing off the court too. You know, like when we had our team meet, and I was like, I want you guys to do stuff as one of our core principles is fraternity. I was like, that scales. So that's something that's gonna be important today, but it's also gonna be important, whatever traits you develop in those core principles are gonna develop you into a better father or husband someday. So those things scale. It's the same thing on the court.

The thing that I, as a young coach, that I'm in the process of every single year, I think I teach one thing more that teaches something later. And so if I can teach this, and so for the basketball people here, when we do a triple switch in the pick and roll, it comes from the same person who is going to double if we need to double in the post. And so the rotations are the same rotation.

So I teach one first, and so then when I go to teach the other thing, I go, it's the same, we already talked about that. And so there's, there's a lot of the teaching process. And this is what I think elite coaches do is they have everything in its proper order and says, I teach this first because it teaches different things. And that's the area for me. I have to do a lot of like self-reflection. And when I get things wrong, I go, ah, maybe that should have been here instead of here. And, um, I think those are the things that will over the course of a career, give me time back.

Chris Kiefer (41:52.13)

Because, yeah, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (42:06.546)

Yeah, that's awesome. Um, moving to some wrap up questions cause we've got a hard stop here. Um, I would, well, first I want to say at some point, I know you've got, um, wife coming back and everything. So this will be a couple of maybe weeks or months, but I also want to do a follow up episode on the off the court. So we just went deep on like technical data strategy. Um, but just planting that seed there for anyone listening that is finding this interesting. We're going to do like the, the other part of Dan that I've known for a long time,

the just like let's think bigger, life's not about basketball, but it's a great tool to teach many other things. So that putting that on the table, the last couple of questions I have for you are books. So what book recommendations do you have for the audience?

Dan Pearson (42:52.241)

Yeah, actually that's probably would lead into a whole entire different route on it because when I think about the books, none of them are basketball oriented. I'd say the three most influential books for me would be Frankl's Man Search for Meaning. I would say maybe Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and very specifically the Grand Inquisitor Scenes in there. There's things that Dostoevsky wrote that all of a sudden your brain is like, whoa, everything else makes sense.

And then I probably go with McClain's River Runs Through It, just the Montana enemy, but also like he just writes as a poet. So those ones, there's an overlap of passion in like religion and philosophy and pretty much all of those things.

Chris Kiefer (43:40.498)

Awesome. And give me a movie recommendation.

Dan Pearson (43:43.941)

Hmm. I mean my favorite movie of all time is Batman Dark Knight like Christopher Nolan I think is fantastic, but I think Dark Knight is like there's a depth to that one that That exists, you know the one I saw recently that someone recommended and I really liked was the Banshees of Inna Sharon I don't know if you've seen that one yet It's actually it came out last year. It's a little bit of an uh, like I know what you would call an off-Broadway Whatever you call it off Hollywood, but it's um, it's essentially about two friends

Chris Kiefer (44:02.118)

Mm-hmm. How old is that one?

Dan Pearson (44:14.637)

that are taking place in this little island off the coast of Ireland during the Civil War. And it's effectively like an analogy for what's happening in the Civil War as they just slowly add on top of trauma after trauma after trauma. And it's just super clever. It's kind of one of those ones that's tough to watch, but it's really clever.

Chris Kiefer (44:34.85)

I was gonna say you saved yourself because if you were to listen to any other episode, I always am like, give me a movie recommendation and don't give me one like The Dark Knight that everybody's seen. It is a good movie, it's a good movie, but it's like, oh thanks, thanks for the, it's like, yeah, have you heard of, go ahead.

Dan Pearson (44:45.081)

Yeah, yeah.

Dan Pearson (44:53.514)

I would have gone through it as I mean because that's the second best movie of all time with young Brad Pitt.

Chris Kiefer (44:58.322)

Yeah, but the Banshees of Inchurian this is like it's got a 7.7 on IMDB So big data guy that's above the 7.3 cutoff that Cody Hopkins and I came up with I don't know if you use that or if we've ever talked about that, but um, yeah, so that's awesome I added that to the watch list Dan if someone wants to get in touch with you, how would you recommend that they do that?

Dan Pearson (45:19.005)

You know, I get off social media at this time every single year. Um, actually today was the day that I deleted my Instagram. So nothing there. Um, I'm on Twitter just to steal basketball stuff. If someone wants to send me an email and chat, uh, D Pearson nine three zero gmail.com is probably the easiest thing for me.

Chris Kiefer (45:37.606)

Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Dan. Super, super fun picking your brain and good to reconnect. And we will definitely be talking soon.

Dan Pearson (45:44.99)

Amen. Good to see you.