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Many sports business students dream of leveraging their degree into an internship with a professional team after which they can work up the ranks of the organization’s operations department. Yet we are always warned that for most people such a path is a mere pipe dream with operations jobs so sought after and difficult to come by.
Former Suns assistant director of basketball operations Amin Elhassan did exactly that, starting as a Suns intern while earning a sports MBA degree at ASU and advancing his way up to the Suns’ assistant director of basketball operations post, a job he held between 2008-11.
Elhassan tells his story in a podcast I co-hosted for my SDSU sports MBA blog that you can listen to at the top of this post or on iTunes. Elhassan describes the myriad duties he undertook, from analytics and scouting to watching over rookies during Summer League and many things in between.
“I was kind of like just the utility guy,” Elhassan said. “Any one of these basketball operations I would be there to assist. I did everything.”
I encourage you to listen to the whole podcast — the first half in particular if you are interested in Elhassan’s story and the second half for some nuggets on the Suns — but below I have pulled out some particularly noteworthy points Elhassan makes:
On the three keys to getting a basketball operations job: “You’ve got to be lucky, you’ve got to be prepared, and you’ve got to know the right people. If you have those three things, you’ll get it.”
On the state of advanced stats: “There at least certain concepts we all accept [such as] … offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency, rebound percentage. I feel like the optical data tracking is the future. This is going to be the be-all, end-all of statistics. It’s no longer an estimation or an overall look.”
On Kobe in Game 6 of the 2010 WCF: “I always go back to Game 6 because we did execute and it didn’t matter, and sometimes it just doesn’t matter. You can have the cheat sheet and you’re still not going to pass the test, and that’s where individual talent sometimes just rises above it.”
On Grant Hill: “We used to joke around that if you wanted to create the perfect athlete in the lab, you would create Grant Hill. All those on-court things, and also the pedigree of being the son of a pro athlete, but as a human being, how to treat people. He treated everybody with respect and gave them the time they deserved like they were all the owners of a franchise. … Grant as a person, that makes me want to be a better person every single day.”
On the 2009-10 Suns: “I think a lot of that whole year was the Culture of We, and everybody in that locker room bought in. We all understood if you do the right thing, rewards will come to you. … After that year obviously that team broke up and everybody went their separate ways, and I would see David Griffin or I would see Louis Amundson or I would see Jason Richardson after we traded him, and all those people we always said the same thing, ‘We didn’t know how good we had it.’ Because what we had in Phoenix that year, that’s not the NBA, that’s something special, and the NBA was what followed, which is people griping over minutes and people griping over shots and front office guys complaining about their coach, coaches complaining about their front office guys and coaches coaching for their jobs instead of coaching for the team. That’s what the NBA is.”
On searching for 2009-10: “I said something when it first started to break up, I said something at the time and to this day it’s the truest feeling ever. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives searching for that feeling one more time, and it’s true, everyone I’ve talked to, no one’s been back to that feeling. We[...]

I was invited on air for a half hour this morning to break down the Phoenix Suns and the Eric Gordon situation with Dr. Jason Calmes of Hornets247 on WGSO in New Orleans.
As you would expect, I gave the Phoenix perspective on the proceedings.
Below you can find a complete rundown of the show as well as the audio itself:
0:00 Overview, Hornets rebrand news
13:00 Suns
43:00 Rockets
1:13:00 Olympic Trials, Gordon
1:29:00 Hornets, including Gordon

Dre Alvarez from the Wages of Wins Network blog NerdNumbers.com joined me on the ValleyoftheSuns podcast to discuss what the Wins Produced stat tells us about the Suns as well as the Second Seconds or Less era and how Phoenix should go about reloading for next season.
Dre feels one of the biggest reasons people see the Suns as a team heading down is because they played the wrong players last season, but he thinks thanks to the Gortat trade (his vote for best trade of the past year) the Suns aren’t in such a bad spot overall.
Alvarez also disagrees with a point Mark Cuban made at the 2011 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in that teams should either try to be really good or really bad, so they can bottom out and draft a star to lead them back to the promised land.
Dre sees the draft as an area that teams botch most often and he doesn’t see a top-three pick as a means to salvation unless it’s in a draft with a franchise player like LeBron, Howard or Duncan. It’s interesting he says this because Lon Babby and the Suns seem to be of the same opinion based on their insistence on continuing to compete with Nash rather than trying to bottom out to find their next star as the conventional wisdom would suggest.

In this NBA Draft edition of the ValleyoftheSuns podcast, Michael Schwartz and Mike Schmitz discuss the prospects likely to be available when the Suns’ No. 13 overall pick comes up as well as some other moves the team can make this offseason and the importance of this draft to the new front office.

In this end of season edition of the ValleyoftheSuns podcast, Michael Schwartz and Mike Schmitz discuss what went wrong (and right) during the Phoenix Suns’ 2010-11 season before analyzing some of the trades made this year and where the franchise might be headed this offseason.

In the All-Star break edition of the ValleyoftheSuns podcast, Michael Schwartz, Mike Schmitz and Tyler Emerick discuss the positives and negatives from the first half of the season, the Suns’ ideal rotation going forward and a little Carmelo before the trio predicts the rest of the year.