Alumnus aims to change sports analytics

Baseball had Billy Bean. Now, basketball has Lean.

Similar to the way Bean and his Oakland Athletics’ Moneyball sabermetrics revolutionized baseball, Georgia Tech junior Matt Creatore, Brown sophomore Mason DiMarco and Georgia Tech graduate Chris Mast are developing an analytical technology and business that they feel has the potential to change basketball.

Lean Basketball Analytics (LBA) LLC is their brainchild, a sports analytics company that touts its Clinch software as “basketball’s newest competitive advantage.”

Creatore, who took AP Physics at Chapel Hill with Jason Curtis in 2011, says that the Lean method centers around finding the player lineups that are most effective.

“We are really good at finding these team’s needles-in-the haystacks, so to speak,” Creatore said. “The guy who doesn’t necessarily score 30 points a game or grab 15 rebounds, but who does the dirty work.”

Lean’s method has the same basic strategy as sabermetrics— find players who are efficient and create the most productive lineup possible. However, Creatore and company help teams achieve their maximum effectiveness using the players that they already have on their roster.

The company’s services have already been employed by multiple high school and college hoops teams, including the Georgia Tech and Florida’s women’s teams and the Texas A&M men. Oakland (CA) University’s men’s team, who Creatore says is their “biggest client,” has jumped out to a 15-8 start, its best in recent years.

The business got its start in spring 2013, when Mast informed Creatore of his idea. Coincidentally, later that day, the Georgia Tech student ran into Yellow Jackets head basketball coach Brian Gregory on the front doorstep of his fraternity house.

“I spoke with him for about 10 minutes, highlighting the information that could be gained from the analysis, and he endorsed my idea,” Mast said.

Afterwards, Mast presented his master plan to the team’s video coordinator, Trent, and found that he was not alone in his opinions.

“[He said] ‘That’s what I’ve been telling the staff whole time; they just never trusted me,’ Creatore said. “And [Mast] said, ‘Now you have the proof.’”

As they manage and grow a business, what stands out about the three entrepreneurs is that they are still college students at competitive universities.

The three feel that, while balancing work and education is sometimes difficult, their upbringings and backgrounds make it manageable.

“The job has given me access to a type of learning that isn’t necessarily possible in a classroom setting, which has done well to complement the education I’ve had at Brown,” DiMarco said.

The group anticipates that they will meet several roadblocks in the coming years, as selling coaches and administrators on a hypothetical idea is never easy.

However, Creatore feels that “the sky’s the limit.”

“This is a market that we’ve calculated to be a 30-35 million dollar market cap—and that’s just for basketball,” he said.