Alaskan turns basketball blogging hobby into NBA front-office gig

At age 39, Seth Partnow found a way to make his NBA dream a reality.

No, he's not a player. The former Anchorage consultant turned his hobby of blogging about basketball analytics into a job in an NBA front office.

The Milwaukee Bucks hired Partnow as their director of basketball research prior to the start of the NBA season.

"It still doesn't feel like going to work. It feels, to some degree, almost like a fantasy camp," Partnow said. "I'm sure that will change as we get into it, but I pinch myself walking into the building every day."

With a passion for hoops and the smarts that helped him earn economics and law degrees, Partnow went from running his own little analytics website to writing and editing for bigger sites to basketball's highest rank — all in about two-and-a-half years.

It happened because he found a niche audience that craved the content he enjoyed producing. But it started with a love for hoops as a kid.

[For the first time since 1999, there are no Alaskans playing in the NBA]

A neighbor’s kindness

When Partnow was around 8 or 9 years old, his family moved next door to a man who had a basketball hoop in his driveway in West Anchorage.

He let Partnow use the hoop whenever he wanted.

"Our neighbor was a gentleman who had played Division I back in his day and was a great shooter and a very friendly guy named Mike Freeman," Partnow said. "He was kind enough to let me use his hoop whenever.

"I just kept shooting and shooting, and that was the way I spent a lot of summer days when I was growing up."

When Partnow wasn't shooting hoops, he sometimes played basketball games on a computer.

He would customize his own teams to figure out the best combinations of players and skill sets — a precursor to his new job.

"As those (games) started getting more advanced and you could start programming in teams yourself — figuring out how to accurately reflect the real teams that existed — it was almost the start of doing some very basic analytics," Partnow said. "Like figuring out what kind of shooting rating does Michael Jordan get, or something like that."

Partnow played basketball at West High and played one year at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. After earning an economics degree from Carleton and a law degree from the University of Minnesota, Partnow moved back to Anchorage in 2005.

He worked for years with his mother, Patricia, at their educational consulting firm, Partnow Consulting.

Yet his love for basketball continued. Partnow often watched hours of games in a single night. In 2013, he decided to use his analytical mind to start researching and writing about the game.

A numbers game

Basketball analytics are much more than just fancy statistics and mind-boggling numbers.

"At its basis, basketball analytics — or any sports analytics — is using information available from the playing of games and things like that to make better decisions about … in-game strategic decisions or a player acquisition and contract decisions," Partnow said.

The goal is to use the information to form "a fuller understanding of what actually matters in terms of winning or losing games," he said.

Partnow's research was the basis for a deep-dive article about rim protection and an examination of the Golden State Warriors' rapid pace of play.

In his first story for the analytics blog Nylon Calculus, he delved into basketball analytics and how technology like the SportVU tracking system is making better analytics possible. SportVU uses a six-camera system to track the positions of players and the ball in real-time at 25 times per second, which opened up a whole new world of basketball data.

Partnow said he put about 120 hours into the article, titled "Splitting the basketball atom." It remains one of his favorite works.

"(I)t was kind of a long-form kind of 'state of NBA analytics,' " Partnow said. "It was definitely a reported piece that I spent a lot of time on, and it got a really good response."

From blogging to the NBA 

Partnow started his first blog — "Where offense happens" — in 2013 for the same reason many people start blogs. He was a fan of the game who figured he had something to share.

He didn't even know if people would read it. But they did, and he started sending articles to bigger blogs with wider audiences.

"I had no idea what I was doing," he said.

One blogger who gave Partnow a chance was Ian Levy. Partnow wrote for Levy's blog, "Hickory High," which was later acquired and folded into "Nylon Calculus."

"I was really impressed," Levy said. "He obviously knew way more about basketball than I did.

"… (H)e could take a small idea and explain it and connect it to a big idea, or go the opposite direction and explain a big idea by breaking it down into its smaller component parts."

While writing for "Nylon Calculus," Partnow's work started to get noticed by media covering the NBA. Timberwolves television analyst Jim Petersen once referenced a Partnow article during a broadcast.

"I actually got an email from a college professor the next day wondering if I was the same Seth Partnow that he'd heard Jim Petersen talking about," Partnow said. "That was kind of a thrill just in terms of having him get back to me that way."

Another time, Partnow received props from Chris Herring, the New York Knicks beat writer for Wall Street Journal.

"That was really a pretty important validation for me that I wasn't just, like, spitting into the wind — I was actually doing things that were interesting for more than just me," Partnow said.

Partnow wouldn't say whether he contacted the Milwaukee Bucks or if they reached out to him, but once the connection was made, he realized he might be able to make a career out of his passion.

Up to that point, Partnow had received compensation for his articles, but it was always just a hobby.

The Bucks hired Partnow as a part-time consultant in May. After seeing what he could do, they hired him full-time as director of basketball research in September.

Partnow uses his research and analytics skills to help the Bucks try to get ahead the league's other 29 teams. Instead of his work being consumed by the public on blogs, it's kept inside the confines of the Bucks' organization.

Partnow said his wife, Maia, the director of sales and special content at Alaska Dispatch News, and his family are big reasons his jump to the NBA worked out. If they hadn't supported him and his passion, he wouldn't have been able to pursue it so fully.

Seth and Maia have two children, Reilly, 3, and Bruce, 4 months.

"Certainly my wife was kind of the strongest supporter of really pursuing it and really seeing where it took us," he said.