STARKVILLE — When Chris Jans was hired as the head coach at New Mexico State in 2017, he was not planning on retaining anybody from the Aggies’ previous staff. That is, until he met Jordan Sperber.
Sperber had been New Mexico State’s video coordinator for a year by then, and he had already grown his blog and analytics-focused website, Hoop Vision, from its origins in his high school days outside of Albany, New York. He prepared diligently for a meeting with Jans, convincing the coach to keep him on board.
Seven years later, the two are on the same team again. Now in his third season as Mississippi State’s head coach, Jans hired Sperber in June as the Bulldogs’ senior director of basketball strategy.
“I was going to hire my own guys,” Jans said. “I will never forget when Jordan left the room after his presentation, I’m like, ‘I’m hiring that guy.’ He made an impact on me. I thought he could influence winning then.”
Like many people who have pursued a career in sports analytics, Sperber’s introduction to the field came through Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” about the previous year’s Oakland Athletics and how they assembled a winning team with a shoestring budget. Sperber liked baseball, but his true passion was basketball, and he began thinking of ways to apply advanced analytics to his favorite sport.
As a junior at Bethlehem Central High School, Sperber started Hoop Vision just as Twitter was starting to become popular, and he was inspired by other college basketball blogs that were on the internet at the time. Sperber started for Bethlehem Central and could have played at the Division III level in college, but instead attended Villanova University outside of Philadelphia and played on the club team there.
In 2014, Sperber graduated from Villanova after just three years with a degree in business administration, and although he never worked with the storied basketball program there — which would win two national championships shortly after he graduated — he continued to grow Hoop Vision to the point where well-known college coaches began discovering it.
“Not a lot of people were reading it, but the people who were reading it happened to be college coaches,” Sperber said. “A couple of the coaches who hired me early in my career were reading the blog when I was in college. It didn’t have a huge viewership by any means early on, but it attracted a certain (type of) person.”
‘Keep up the good work’
During his last year at Villanova, Sperber worked as an analytics consultant for the New Mexico State program, coached at the time by Marvin Menzies, who built the Aggies into regular NCAA Tournament participants. But a much bigger name in the coaching industry would soon come calling.
Eric Musselman was an assistant at Arizona State then, but had spent three years as an NBA head coach with the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings. He came across Sperber’s website and sent him a brief email, telling him to “keep up the good work.” In 2015, Musselman became the head coach at Nevada, and he brought Sperber on as a graduate assistant.
After a year in Reno, Sperber rejoined the New Mexico State staff on a full-time basis as video coordinator under Paul Weir, a former assistant who replaced Menzies in 2016. Weir spent just one more season in Las Cruces, then jumped to in-state rival New Mexico, and the Aggies replaced him with Jans.
“Coach Jans had some experience with analytics,” Sperber said. “He might not admit it, but he is a numbers guy. He does like numbers. I was pretty well-prepared for my first meeting with him to show him what I could do to add value to his staff and the program. It went from, ‘No way I was going to get this spot,’ to convincing him in that first meeting that I could be of value to him.”
New Mexico State won the Western Athletic Conference regular season and tournament titles in 2018, losing to Clemson in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Sperber then decided to leave coaching and return to Albany, building Hoop Vision into a paid newsletter and YouTube channel.
“I didn’t know exactly what Hoop Vision could be, but I had some ideas in my head,” Sperber said. “One thing I knew with making content was it would get my name out there even further, so if I ever wanted to get back into coaching, I would probably have a bigger network.”
Sperber grew Hoop Vision on Substack, launching Hoop Vision Plus in 2019 to provide paid subscribers with a premium newsletter and exclusive audio and video content. He wrote statistical analysis pieces, broke down offensive and defensive concepts and even posted coaching tutorials.
Even five months after Sperber officially moved on from Hoop Vision, his YouTube channel still has 118,000 subscribers, with a video about Bellarmine University’s offense — titled “The Team That Doesn’t Dribble” — currently at 2.7 million views.
“It really helped me grow as a coach, because of all the different basketball I watched,” Sperber said. “I learned a lot in that time that helped me now in this role.”
‘He’s a beast’
Sperber remained in touch periodically with Jans throughout his six years running Hoop Vision, sending him a text when Jans signed a four-year contract extension with MSU in May. After what started out as a casual conversation, Jans began to think about getting Sperber back into coaching as he restructured his staff following former assistant coach James Miller’s departure for a job at Oklahoma State.
“He looks at the game differently than the average coach,” Jans said. “All he’s done for six years is study basketball. That’s what he’s done, is study the nuances of the game and how different people coach and teach the game and play the game. He’s been beneficial already, but I believe he’ll make us better as the season unfolds. I looked at it as, ‘Who can make us two or three points better every night?’ When you play a lot of close games, that can be the difference.”
With the Bulldogs, Sperber handles the same tasks a video coordinator is often responsible for, but also dives into advanced analytics and gives reports to the coaching staff after every game about how the data he finds can help the team. He also tracks MSU’s upcoming opponents and their tendencies to help with scouting.
“He’s a beast,” assistant coach Patrice Days said. “I get to share an office with him every day. He’s in there and he’s relentless. It gives us another weapon. With the minds that Coach Jans and our staff have and the body of work we’ve been able to do, having him gives us another level, another boost.”
Sperber flirted with multiple NBA teams before taking the job in Starkville, and he said he has not thought much about his long-term career plans. For now, he is committed to helping Jans and the Bulldogs win, and Jans knows how fortunate he is to have one of the brightest analytical minds in basketball on his side.
“I’ve never had super well-defined goals, but it’s always been to make a good living working in basketball, and I’m fortunate that I have that here,” Sperber said. “I’m committed to (Jans) and to Mississippi State, and I haven’t thought a ton about five years from now or 10 years from now. The appeal of knowing who I was working for, knowing Coach Jans well and what I was getting myself into was big for taking this opportunity.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
