For many years now, businesses and marketing companies have lived and died by, based their entire trajectories on, and believed in the analytics that they produce. It's unfathomable to imagine a company that "does not believe" in basing decisions off analytics. If people click on links to continue shopping for lampshades, then links for lampshades become more accessible. Maybe the CEO did not have a long term plan to implement more lampshade links, but he would be looked at as a fool for not trying to maximize what people are gravitated toward.
Now apply that same theory to a larger business, basketball. The NBA alone has employees worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and each organization flirts with being worth one billion dollars. As numbers take over modern business, there is a slower, but nonetheless growing trend in basketball. This paper will discuss how analytics go much deeper in the basketball world now more than ever, as a focus on being numerically sound has changed the formula for coaching, team assembly, and even personal player development. Furthermore, this paper will justify the "trickle-down effect" (Goldsberry) from analytics at the professional level to youth levels, and why the inclusion of analytics in younger basketball leagues throughout the United States will be a net positive for the sport. With this, the comparison of success in analytics in Europe will show how the United States is falling behind in how basketball is coached, and what they can do to recover.