During a recent visit to the dedicated Brooklyn team house for his North American esports squad, Team VGJ Storm, Nets point guard Jeremy Lin spoke about wanting to instill a proper “team culture and healthy habits” in his Dota 2 players.
Lin is a co-owner of the Storm and its China-based Team VGJ counterpart, Thunder, as well as an eight-year veteran of the NBA, whose starring 35-game stint with the neighboring-borough Knicks prompted the Linsanity rage that adorned consecutive Sports Illustrated covers and brought life-changing attention for the Harvard-educated guard.
While sitting down with team manager Jack Chen — well known in the esports world as KBBQ — for a video posted on Team VGJ’s YouTube account, Lin described the parallels between the sport in which he’s a player and the one in which he’s an owner. He explained his desire to be “a voice and a mentor” in helping the gamers with pressure, team dynamics, business decisions and everything in between. Lin’s personal trainer, Josh Fan, has designed a program with workout videos for the esports players.
“In the pro circuit, everything counts, and you’re fighting tooth and nail for every bit of progress, advancement, improvement, advantage,” Lin said. “There’s a whole mental component of figuring out how to make your craft a lifestyle and how to give yourself a better chance of success than the other person.”
Just as basketball has seen an infiltration of analytics informing game play, Lin wants to bring that same objective approach to governing Team VGJ’s philosophies and strategies. He said he wants “deeper-level stats beyond just kills, deaths, assists — we’re talking win shares or defensive efficiency.”
“I think what we’re going to see is just another level of depth of understanding and detail in how you recruit players, how organizations are run, how teams operate, how to watch film, even travel plans and living situations,” Lin said.
While speaking on an esports panel at the Sloan Analytics Conference in Boston last month, Lin expounded upon the point, noting that in Dota all players compete in the same digital realm, which ought to facilitate data tracking. It’s not like, say, basketball where players compete in high school, AAU and a number of other leagues; in Dota, it’s all in the same game platform.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
Furthermore, Lin described a situation where there’s no financial incentive for anyone to be an esports coach because anyone with sufficient talent wants to play.
That will need to change, he said, which will make a shift in scouting players because coaches will want players tailored for their system or style of play. Right now, he said Dota recruiting is basically just “word of mouth” with friends recommending each other. The best 450 basketball players in the world aren’t the same 450 players in the NBA because organizations need to deploy mix-and-match skill sets for their needs, which supersedes raw ability.
“I think developing [esports] coaches and developing a ‘front office,’ per se, where you can go and find talent,” Lin said. “That’s where it needs to evolve into.”
And Lin, who is currently rehabbing a season-ending knee injury he suffered on opening night, drove home the point of how hard esports players work by filming a spoof video in which he tries to switch from hoops to video games.
“Maybe the most surprising thing is just the sheer number of hours that it takes to be a pro Dota player,” he said. “With sports, my body can only withstand three hours of intense work, and that’s on the high end. That’s like a game, two hours, two and a half hours. But, Dota, you can play 10 hours, 12 hours. They work really, really hard.”
Suggested further reading:
Why Brooklyn Nets Point Guard Jeremy Lin Launched An Esports Team