When Jacob Goldstein ’15 was offered a job in the National Basketball Association, he worried briefly that it might be hard to maintain a work-life balance.

      He told me this a week after the 2024–25 NBA regular season had ended in April; he had just returned from a vacation in California. It had been a great trip, he said. He got to watch a lot of basketball.

      “It’s almost ironic, but vacation is really the first chance I have to sit down and watch other teams play,” Goldstein says. “Despite being in the league, I still am deeply, deeply obsessed with basketball.”

      Goldstein spends almost all his waking hours—and some of his sleeping ones—thinking about basketball analysis for the Washington Wizards, for whom he is “the data guy”—technically, the manager of basketball research. His analytical input is now integral to almost every decision for the team, from whom they draft and sign to how players can improve their performance on the court.

      “A really cool part of my job is explaining to a player, ‘Hey, here’s why this number matters [to your game],’” says Goldstein, 28. “‘Even though you are a million times better than me at basketball, here’s why getting better at this skill can make you a more impactful player.’”

      Data analytics was introduced into professional sports by baseball’s Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s, and its influence exploded after the success of the book, Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. Professional basketball has embraced the numbers more eagerly than perhaps any other league.

      It has created an entry point for people like Goldstein, who couldn’t play the game competitively at Taft because of head injuries he experienced when he was younger. He connected with the sport as a fan, and on social media he discovered a community of other “nerds,” he says, who loved introducing new ways to understand the game through creative stats.

      Goldstein’s claim to fame is the invention of a new metric called Player Impact Plus-Minus, which he developed in college. It gauges a player’s value, relative to a replacement player, in terms of how they help a team win. The leaderboard rankings are filled with the usual suspects—LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Luka Doncic. But where Goldstein’s metric stood out was its recognition of non-superstars—particularly lengthy, athletic forwards who can defend and shoot 3-pointers—whose contributions go beyond the standard box scores.

      What he considered a hobby turned serious when met Dean Oliver, a basketball statistics guru at ESPN. Oliver got hired as an assistant coach for the Wizards—fancy that, an analytics expert on the bench—and in 2020, he approached Goldstein about working for the team’s research department. It was a dream opportunity, but Goldstein questioned his own qualifications.

      “I didn’t have any academic background in statistics,” he says. “I took some stats courses in college, but I was not a stats major or a data science major. I was a mechanical engineer. I just taught myself everything I know.”

      The Wizards hired him anyway, teaming him with Katherine Evans, who has a doctorate in statistics from Harvard and had been working with the Toronto Raptors. Goldstein said it could not have worked out better for him. “I generally think there are three things you need to get a job working for a sports team,” he says. “One of them is doing a good job. One of them is being in the right position at the right time. And the other one is getting lucky.”

      A sports career isn’t for everyone. It demands almost complete devotion, eats up weekends and holidays, and the rebuilding seasons (as the Wizards have been shown) can be torturous. But Goldstein has caught the basketball bug. He says he wants to eventually run a franchise, as the general manager, and lead a championship dynasty.

      “This was a hobby for me well before I ever dreamed it could be a career,” Goldstein says. “It still doesn’t seem real.”