Dime is the premier basketball magazine, covering the NBA, NCAA, High School, Playground and International basketball - as well as sneakers, fashion and music.
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these players. When we evaluate these pros- pects and find out insane numbers, other scouts might be just as impressed as we are. I have heard stories about general managers from both football and basketball that have said they saw the Sport Science segment and it impressed them. There is obviously no way that I can prove that correlation is true. Dime: One of your segments involved Brandon Knight. That segment was particularly interest- ing because not only did you analyze his physi- cal attributes, but you also managed to look at his mental makeup. Measuring the mental aspect of the game seems difficult, so how do athletes so we know the reaction times, acceleration, launch angles, power and force. We know all of the different components involved in ev- ery sport, so when we are analyzing video and doing all of our calcula- tions, we are able to figure out things that other people can't because we have done experiments in the past that have actually replicated that game situation. Dime: You analyzed a bunch of this year's NBA rookies before the draft. Based on experiments from past years, how does this group compare to other classes? JB: A lot of people want to know where basketball or athletics is go- ing in the future. I think what we are seeing in the draft is that there is less of a disparity between the top player and the player drafted last. Players are becoming so explosive, fast, quick and agile that every year the average among the elite players keeps going up. That means that players have higher ceilings and that they are approaching these ceilings at a greater rate. I think what we are seeing is that players coming out of col- lege are younger, bigger, faster and stronger than they ever were before. This is natu- rally going to keep happening due to the evolution of athletes. All of the guys that come into our lab are incredible athletes. Perhaps if they came into our lab 15 or 20 years ago, a lot of them would have been considered the best athlete of all time. It seems that with so many great athletes all around, there is a bunching at the top for the truly elite players. you look at it? JB: That is the hardest part to try to quan- tify. What is someone's athletic IQ? We can ask how smart someone is under pressure or how smart someone is in a specific posi- tion, but that is something that is very hard to develop a definitive test for. Part of being on Sport Science is all about your character. When you are a superstar, you are willing to do whatever it takes to get better. Athletes know that coming to Sport Science is an op- portunity for them to learn some- thing they didn't already know about themselves. People ask me all of the time what quality is the same among the world's greatest athletes. I'm telling you, there is no such thing as the "great ath- lete gene." Great athletes all have great work ethics – that is the great separator. When you look at the professional level, they are all great athletes. The ones who are in the elite category all do the extra things that others are not willing to do. Dime: Two other interesting seg- ments you did were on Maya Moore and Brittney Griner. Have you ever had female athletes as exceptional as them? JB: I think the great disadvan- tage that women have had these days is just pure exposure. There hasn't been women's basketball around nearly as long or nearly to the degree of men's basket- ball. When you see these amaz- ing female basketball players, a lot of the ones that can truly hang with the men are the outli- Dime: You guys found an interesting correla- tion in your data that players who were fea- tured on the show tended to get drafted higher than they were initially projected. Do you think that is a valid statistic? JB: We've been doing this for so long now that there seems to be a pattern. Players will come into the lab, impress us, go on national television and move up in the draft. I hon- estly can't say for certain that there is a true correlation, but it might be a byproduct of the fact that we are the only ones looking at 37 ers of their set. As a society, we haven't had women playing sports at all levels nearly on the degree that we see now. I think that you are going to see this rapid accelera- tion in the next 10 or 20 years of female athletes bunching up at the top. Someone like Brittney Griner is unbelievable. You have her in the lab and you cannot believe how great of an athlete she is. I don't like to separate things between gender; I just like to look at how amazing we are as a human species.