The Seed Report in Las Vegas
I’ll be in Las Vegas July 10-15, for the 2026 Basketball Career Conference, NBA Summer League, and the chance to learn from people who know this game at the highest levels.
The Seed Report is my independent college basketball intelligence project. It began with NCAA Tournament prediction and has grown into a broader effort to study team identity, player evaluation, draft value, and the transition from college production to the professional game.
I’m not coming to Vegas pretending I have all the answers.
I’m coming to learn, listen, compare notes, meet good basketball people, and pick the brains of anyone willing to talk hoops, scouting, analytics, player development, or the future of evaluation.
What I’m Working On
The Seed Report currently focuses on:
- NCAA Tournament forecasting
- Team identity and matchup risk
- College player evaluation
- Chief’s Big Boards
- Model-versus-consensus comparisons
- Draft value and player translation
- Identifying players or teams the public conversation may be missing
The project started with the bracket, but the bigger question now is broader:
What does the data see before the consensus catches up?
Why I’m Here
I’m here to learn from some of the best people in basketball.
That includes executives, scouts, analysts, coaches, agents, player-development people, media members, and anyone else who thinks seriously about how basketball decisions are made.
I’m especially interested in conversations about:
- How teams evaluate college players
- What data helps scouts and what data gets in the way
- Where college production translates well to the next level
- Where models tend to miss
- How independent analysis can become more useful to basketball decision-makers
A Soft Introduction
I’m The Chief — a retired Navy Chief and Gulf War veteran who somehow turned a long-running bracket obsession into a larger basketball modeling project.
Years ago, I lost a national bracket contest because I ignored my own data and picked my beloved Memphis Tigers with my heart.
That mistake became the unofficial motto of The Seed Report:
Data over heart. Science over seeding.
Let’s Talk Basketball
If we meet in Vegas, I’d love to talk.
Not a pitch. Not a hard sell. Just a real basketball conversation.
If something in The Seed Report is useful, interesting, wrong, promising, or worth challenging, I want to hear it.
That is why I’m here.
Player Evaluation Conversations
One area I am especially interested in discussing is player evaluation.
The Seed Report has a few player evaluation products. However we are working on trying to make them all better. We are developing a new framework and an early visual prototype built around the idea of a spider/radar profile.
The concept is to show a player’s statistical shape, then explore how that shape changes if certain traits improve or translate differently.
I would love to hear from scouts, analysts, coaches, player-development people, and basketball operations people about where this kind of tool could help, where it may be misleading, and what serious evaluators would want to see added.
This is exactly why I’m in Vegas: to learn, listen, compare notes, and improve the work.
