Glenn DuPaul, who worked as an analytics intern for baseball's Kansas City Royals, is the Nets new director of analytics, NetsDaily has learned. DuPaul, who graduated from Lehigh earlier this year, had served as an intern for the Royals for nearly a year and a half before joining the Nets earlier this month.
He lists his new job on his LinkedIn page.
DuPaul has been working sports analytics --aka sabremetrics-- for several years, according to his LinkedIn bio, He's worked previously as an intern at Basketball Info Solutions, and a sabremetrics columnist at both Hardball Times and Beyond the Boxscore, an SB Nation blog. He's also written for ESPN and SI's "Call to the Pen" baseball blog. For a while, he had his own site, Baseball's Economist. He has a degree in Business/Managerial Economics from Lehigh.
Although his expertise is in baseball, the Nets believe his methodology is easily transferable to NBA analytics. The Nets scoured hundreds of resumes before choosing DuPaul.
Bryan Grosnick, editor of SBNation's "Beyond the Boxscore", an analytics blog where DuPaul was a columnist , praised the hire.
"Your team's awfully lucky. Glenn's brilliant, and his skills will *definitely* transfer over to basketball. I've dabbled very briefly in basketball analytics, and I can tell he'll be great in that role," said Grosnick.
A Nets insider admitted that the hire was "out of the box" but that DuPaul came with "glowing endorsements" from the Royals who did go to the World Series this year and have a reputation as an operation that takes advantage of analytics. The Nets coach, Lionel Hollins, however, has been a poster boy for those who've criticized over-reliance on deep stats.
While at Lehigh, he presented a paper on a predictive metric to forecast earned run averages for major league pitchers. Lehigh posted an excerpt on the university's website.
DuPaul replaces Scott Sereday who departed over the summer.