The New York Knicks continue to build their analytics department as the team hired Kelsey Roberts as a full-time basketball / database analyst, as recognized by Seth Parnow in a list of current analytics staff members across the NBA at earlier this month, and later noticed by Alder Almo and Mike Scotto.
This happens a month after the team hired Sean Maclean as their basketball strategy manager. Almo coincidentally broke the news of MacLean nearly a month earlier after finding his post on LinkedIn. Roberts may be one of the first women to work in the Knicks front office.
Roberts graduated from Xavier University in 2016 with a degree in Business Administration. He spent two years working at cosmetics company Kao Corporation before enrolling full-time at the University of Arkansas to pursue a Masters in Statistics.
Between 2018-19, Roberts did an internship at Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat in their analytics departments. It was in these internships that he used his knowledge in database programming (Python, R, SQL, etc.) to improve the quality of the basketball metrics that would be sent to the technical staff.
Roberts’ role seems clearly oriented towards the creation of databases capable of churning out information in real time to be sent to the technical staff to monitor the development of the player and the team. The Knicks only had three full-time analytics employees – Mike Arcieri, Mike Smith, and Richard Dry – last season.
Roberts will most likely work with this team, which The Athletic has reportedly expanded under Rose, while potentially coordinating with MacLean and the Basketball Strategy team – led by Brock Aller – in terms of providing the appropriate data metrics.