Thank you for reading The F5
It’s time to shut this newsletter down.
I recently accepted a job with the New York Knicks to become the coordinator of coaching analytics, which means this is my last post.
I launched this newsletter back in January without any expectations. I figured if I got a few dozen people to subscribe then I could justify the amount of basketball I was watching. Instead, around three thousand people signed up and this newsletter became something I looked forward to putting together each week.
Without endorsement and shout outs from people I admire like Henry Abbott, Ben Falk, Seth Partnow, Kevin Pelton, and many others I doubt The F5 would have grown the way it has. I know how difficult it can be to get traction on something like this unless you’re already established or someone who is established gives you a signal boost. With that in mind, I recommend following the work of these somewhat lesser known NBA analytics people:
I don’t have much advice to give to anyone who is looking to get a job in the NBA. I got lucky. Right time, right place. But everything you’ve seen or heard about increasing your chances of snagging a job in the NBA is probably true.
Do the job before you have it and show your work. Do whatever you want, but I think it’s important that if you’re going to work for free, you should work for yourself. For me, that meant starting a newsletter and writing tutorials on how to work with public NBA data. For you, it might mean building a draft model or creating a database of something that isn’t publicly tracked. What I found most helpful was sticking to a weekly schedule and writing things up instead of just creating charts and posting them on social media.
I hope you enjoyed reading The F5 as much as I enjoyed writing it. I also hope you learned something. And if not, then I at least hope you enjoyed the colors, fonts, and typos in my charts.
Thanks,
Owen
If you’re a free subscriber to The F5, this will be the last email you’ll get from me. If you signed up for a paid subscription, please be on the lookout for a separate email later today with details regarding your refund and access to the archives.
My wife works with R and data visualization in the environmental health field and reading the F5 helped me better appreciate what she does for a living and initiate fun conversations about her career that were a lot more meaningful than "so how was your day." That your subject matter happened to be basketball was just icing on the cake. Thank you for your work--we're sad to see the newsletter go, but very pleased with your destination! Congrats and GO NY GO NY GO!
Wow, big big big congratulations to you! While we will definitely miss your newsletters (I, for one, will), and even if we didn't comment much (or at all, in my case), please do know that all of us greatly appreciate the content you put out. Reading your stuff has opened up my eyes to data analytics and allowed me to view it in a more entertaining way (it helps that it's about something fun, i.e. basketball). "Let us not be sad that something has ended, but glad that we got to experience it in the first place." You're going to kill it at your new job - the Knicks got a good one! All the best!