Sixers Hire New Personnel for Analytics & Strategy Staff

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Bryan Colangelo announced today that the team has made several key additions to the analytics and strategy department, naming Andy Miller, Alex D’Amour and Alex Franks as Senior Researchers, and Grant Fiddyment and Michael Lai as Data Scientists.

“We are very excited to add this level of intelligence, experience and innovation to our already deep analytics and strategy group,” Colangelo said. “Vice President Alex Rucker and Director Sergi Oliva did a great job identifying and securing the highest level candidates from a worldwide pool of talent as we address expansion plans of our current systems, processes and capabilities.”

Miller is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University, D’Amour is currently a Neyman Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley and Franks is a Moore-Sloan eScience Fellow at the University of Washington. Together they presented award-winning work at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and also published their methodology for extracting insights from player-tracking data in major research journals in Statistics, Machine Learning and Sports Analytics.

Fiddyment joins the Sixers analytics team with a background in modeling and scientific computing after recently earning a PhD in computational neuroscience from Boston University. Prior, Fiddyment completed both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Georgia. He was a finalist in the ESPN Hackathon at the 2016 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Lai was most recently with IBM’s Advanced Analytics team, where he worked as a Data Scientist and Strategy Consultant in their New York office. With eight years of experience as an Equity Options Trader prior to joining IBM, Lai brings a strong background in analysis, modeling and strategy.