Simone Casali has been a Nets international scout since 2015 and director of international scouting for several years.
In an interview with the website of the Italian Basketball Federation, the Brooklyn Nets director of international scouting, Simone Casali, talks about just how complicated the “puzzle” of international scouting has become, whether it’s balancing analytics with the eye test, making sure that diamonds in the rough don’t go unnoticed or staying aligned with what Sean Marks and Brooklyn are thinking.
He even admits that mistakes are made and as in most aspects of life, luck plays a role, particularly on Draft Night.
“There, mistakes are the order of the day because there are things that you cannot predict, or that you predict from one perspective and not another,” said Casali who’s worked with the Nets since Marks has been GM and has been director of international scouting focusing on Europe since 2019.
“We must not underestimate how history is full of players who struggled in their first team and then exploded in the second because there they found the right situation and the right context. You can make mistakes for no reason or get it right simply by luck,” he told Dario Ronzulli of FIP.it in an Italian language interview published Tuesday. (All quotes are Google machine translations.)
Of course, the Nets haven’t drafted an international prospect since 2018 when they took Dzanan Musa late in the first round and Rodions Kurucs early in the second. Both are out of the league playing in Europe. On the other hand, the Nets now have 31 draft picks through 2031 — 15 firsts and 16 seconds — more than any other team but the Oklahoma City Thunder.
One thing that Casali doesn’t expect to see: call it the “Bo Cruz effect,” finding an unknown in a playground setting, like the fictional “Bo Cruz” in Adam Sandler’s movie, “Hustle.” That doesn’t happen anymore, he said. The world has gotten a lot smaller with social media.
“Great movie, Adam Sandler is one of my favorite actors but that story is not real: today it is essentially impossible to find a player who is not already in someone’s notebook,” said Casali.
“The last case vaguely associable is that of Giannis Antetokounmpo, who came out of nowhere; but as soon as word spread that there was an enormous talent in Athens in a very short time all 30 franchises went to see him live,” he recalled.
“Today we can see games from every championship at every latitude and potentially it is an infinite job, it is almost impossible for a name to go unnoticed until the Draft. Of course, it can always happen that a player explodes in the year of his eligibility and then there is the need to compact the scouting into less time.”
According to league sources, the Nets have one of the largest if not the largest scouting staff in the league, both full-time and part-time as well as an extensive scouting database that includes everything from video to newspaper clippings, police reports if the prospect has had legal issues, and of course analytics, something Casali helped pioneer in Europe.
“I chose this career because I loved basketball scores. I was lucky enough to become passionate about the subject early on and then I was lucky enough to cross paths with Sergio Scariolo, who was the first coach who looked at advanced statistics with great attention,” Casali said of the Spanish national team coach and veteran Euroleague coach (who Jordi Fernandez has called a basketball father.) Of course, it’s a balancing act.
“However, I don’t rely only on analytics: I look at a player, I get an idea of his characteristics and I go and study the advanced statistics to understand if he is really the profile I had thought he was. I also look a lot at the statistics that concern an entire team, what the trends are, what types of players will then adapt to other types. I still believe a lot in selecting players based on what the coach on duty asks of them. There is data on team trends that could help a lot,”
In talking about the Nets current situation, Casali said it doesn’t much matter if Brooklyn is in a rebuild or contention. The job is the same: he has to be nimble, recognizing that things can change quickly in the NBA,
“My job is basically a mega puzzle in which I have to take all the useful pieces to create the most complete profile possible and then choose the right profiles that fit with the team. All this to provide the necessary information that allows Brooklyn and Sean Marks to make the best choice,” he said.
“Whether the Nets are in the rebuilding phase or want to be a contender does not change much for me. In the NBA, a lot can change from one moment to the next, I cannot know when we will have a choice available and how high. It can happen, for example, that on the night of the Draft you suddenly find yourself with choices available as a result of a trade: you cannot afford to improvise. Scouting always follows the same rules, the same attention to detail.”
- Italians, Simone Casali and that NBA train that only passes once… – Dario Ronzulli – Italian Basketball Federation.