By Daniel P. Smith<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dave Lewin \u201909 had only recently washed the champagne out of his hair when he walked into the Boston Celtics practice facility on the morning of June 18, 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Less than twelve hours after the Celtics clinched the 2024 NBA title with a 106-88 victory over the Dallas Mavericks, Lewin leaned against a gymnasium wall as Celtics staff put an NBA hopeful through a series of basketball drills. The NBA Draft was eight days away and Lewin, the assistant general manager of the Celtics, was already looking ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s the reality of this job,\u201d Lewin says. \u201cChampionship or not, next season\u2019s happening and we need to be ready for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lewin, of course, isn\u2019t complaining. This is precisely what he wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his Boston-bred childhood, Lewin dreamed of being something different from his peers. While others fantasized about becoming a Boston sports legend like Larry Bird or Tom Brady, Lewin was more drawn to those who assembled the city\u2019s title teams, individuals like Celtics executive Red Auerbach or Theo Epstein, the hometown wonderkid who halted the Red Sox\u2019s eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004. In fact, when Lewin played video games like NBA Live<\/em> or Madden<\/em>, he devoted his time to assembling rosters through trades and signings before simulating the games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was the perspective I operated from,\u201d Lewin says, crediting Boston\u2019s \u201cintellectual fandom\u201d for stoking his interest in front office work. \u201cFrom a young age, I was aware that there were people whose job it was to find the right players and put together the roster.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it came time for college, Lewin\u2019s Harvard-educated parents encouraged him to select an undergraduate-focused liberal arts school. Macalester appealed with its strong academics and invitation to play collegiate football.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By his sophomore year at Mac, Lewin, a math and econ double major, had become even more fanatical about data\u2019s role in athletic contexts. He embraced every opportunity to apply statistical concepts and techniques to team sports, including tackling independent projects with Vittorio Addona, a professor in the Math, Statistics, and Computer Science Department whose research includes sports statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was me taking advantage of what makes Mac special: the opportunity to get help from a talented professor in my field of interest,\u201d Lewin says of Addona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Moneyball<\/em>\u2014a data-driven approach to evaluate players\u2014further infiltrated professional sports, Lewin noted franchises\u2019 rising interest in \u201cquantitatively oriented\u201d individuals and shared his work with Addona to generate opportunities with NBA teams. He landed summer internships with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007 and 2008, supporting a front office eager to create meaning out of basketball data and capitalize on the generational talent of a young LeBron James.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back at Mac, meanwhile, Lewin traded the gridiron for the hardwood as his fascination with basketball swelled. He earned a spot on the basketball team and his two years as a reserve guard with the Scots delivered a heightened knowledge of the game\u2019s tactics and schemes, which only sharpened his analytics work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen I think of Dave, the first word that comes to mind is brilliance,\u201d says Abe Woldeslassie \u201908, Mac\u2019s current head basketball coach and Lewin\u2019s former teammate. \u201cHe was thinking about basketball stats in a way few others were back then.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last dozen years, Lewin has filled a variety of roles for the Celtics related to scouting, salary cap, strategy, and analytics. He also had a three-year stint as general manager of the Celtics\u2019 G-League (minor league) team, the Maine Red Claws. There, given an organizational edict to find the best up-and-coming coaches, he was a part of hiring a young assistant coach from tiny Fairmont State University. Eight years later, that coach, Joe Mazzulla, steered the Celtics to a league-leading eighteenth championship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A naturally competitive person, Lewin relishes the challenge of trying to build the best possible team within the constraints of the NBA salary cap, one intentionally designed to promote parity. He spends his days collecting insights from coaches, players, scouts, and other front office peers and poring over spreadsheets of player information\u2014a vital grind to ensure the Celtics possess every ounce of information necessary to make shrewd personnel decisions in the draft, free agency, and trade market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy job is a lot like the class you take in college in which the entire grade is the final exam,\u201d says Lewin, who was promoted to assistant general manager in 2022. \u201cYou prepare for the big decisions over months and years, but all anyone will care about is whether you get those couple of big decisions a year right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given the Celtics\u2019 success over the last dozen years\u2014six Eastern Conference Finals appearances, two NBA Finals runs, and one title\u2014Lewin enjoys stability rare to find in pro sports. He\u2019s also earned accelerating attention. In August, The Athletic<\/em> named Lewin to its list of forty prominent NBA coaches, executives, managers, and influencers under age forty, and his name frequently arises when front office positions open elsewhere around the NBA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLong term, who knows what happens,\u201d Lewin says of someday leading an NBA franchise. \u201cRight now, I just know I\u2019m blessed to do this in my hometown as part of a high-level team alongside great people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniel P. Smith is an independent writer based in Chicago and frequent contributor to <\/em>Macalester Today.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From champagne showers to draft day drills, a Macalester grad’s relentless data-driven vision fuels the Celtics’ championship dynasty, proving that behind every title team, there’s a front office mastermind already plotting the next victory.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":26853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,45],"tags":[17,52],"class_list":["post-26849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-alumni","tag-economics","tag-mathematics-statistics-and-computer-science","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26849"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30366,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26849\/revisions\/30366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Paying his dues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Constructing a champion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n