Dean Oliver is a pioneer in sports analytics, working in both basketball and football. He has an established track record of working with decision-makers to identify the right questions and right answers for building a team. He played basketball through his sophomore year at Caltech before joining the coaching staff. As a doctoral student for four years at North Carolina, he simultaneously served as a collegiate advance scout, working for Bill Bertka, longtime assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. Dean wrote Basketball on Paper in 2002 and it was published in 2003, only months after Michael Lewis’ Moneyball came out that showed how valuable analytics already were in baseball. Basketball on Paper then became the handbook for how to do basketball analytics and Dean became the first analytics consultant in the NBA. He worked with Hall of Fame Coach George Karl, star players, the front office, and scouts to show how traditional basketball questions could be turned into more clear answers.After several years in the NBA, Dean joined ESPN when it wanted to build a sports analytics group. He guided the group to successful football and basketball metrics, while building relationships internally and externally. The QBR metric has a flexible framework to incorporate as much of a quarterback’s performance as possible, including offensive line performance. His group also built a Pass Protection metric, which has been embraced as a very useful stand-alone tool for evaluating the offensive line. Dean continued and expanded his football work with TruMedia, an engineering firm that focuses on sports analytics, before the Washington Wizards brought him back to the NBA to work with coaches. He spent four years working directly with players and coaches before taking time off to write a second book.With an emphasis on “translating between words and numbers, then back again,” Dean has established himself as one of the thought leaders in the age of ever-increasing data.