Golden State Warriors' Summer League assistant on remarkable path

LAS VEGAS – Most NBA data analysts ply their craft far from the basketball court, working more with percentages than pick-and-roll techniques, but Hannah Heiring isn’t the typical number-cruncher.

There she was, on the court this week, running through drills along with the Warriors’ Summer League team in her role on the coaching staff in Las Vegas.

Just two years ago, this would have never seemed possible to the 25-year-old former Division III guard who at that time was working remotely as a business analyst for a small insurance company.

By last summer, Heiring was parading down Market Street after helping the Warriors win the NBA Finals. Now, after her first full season on the job, Heiring has entrenched herself within the organization and serves as a valuable resource to Steve Kerr and his coaching staff. She can also now say she’s one of only a handful of women to serve as an assistant coach at Summer League.

“It’s still pretty surreal,” Heiring said.

Heiring’s current job is a combination of her favorite things: basketball, statistics and storytelling. During the regular season, she’s neck-deep in work as she helps track player tendencies and trends that the coaching staff can, in turn, use to develop a game plan.

Heiring said people within the Warriors, including vice president of basketball operations Kirk Lacob, have described her as a “translator.” Warriors director of analytics Pabail Sidhu said Heiring is a layer of “quality control” for the team.

“As a coach you can’t watch every single thing about a certain player, it’s nearly impossible,” Sidhu said. “Time doesn’t allow for that.”

“But the numbers sometimes can capture that information,” Sidhu continued. “And so she’ll say something. And she prepares the coaches, so the coach walks into a meeting and some of the information they’re sharing is coming from Hannah and the [analytics] team.”

Heiring is taking on additional responsibilities on the Summer League coaching staff selected by Santa Cruz general manager David Fatoki, getting a chance to be more involved with practices and game action. She’s also working more closely with players and breaking down film.

“In Summer League, you really break it down to fundamentals,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for me to understand why we do things the way that we do.”

Like many basketball lifers, Heiring’s hoops journey began as a family affair. Her first team was coached by her father, Steve, and featured her twin brother and older brother. Her mother, Susan, went to every game.

Heiring has fond memories of leaving school early to watch the Minnesota Lynx in the WNBA Finals, which they won four times from 2011-2017 with stars Sylvia Fowles, Maya Moore and Lindsey Whalen.

“Those sort of things that you’re like, in the moment, you don’t think … that [it] was important, but in the grand scheme of things, it helped shape my love for basketball,” Heiring said.

Math had always come naturally to her since elementary school. An AP statistics class in high school piqued her interest in potentially pursuing a career in numbers.

Yet as she went off to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she played basketball and golf, Heiring still wasn’t sure what major she wanted to study.

A few math and economics courses later, though, she settled on quantitative economics.

During her studies, she focused a lot of her big projects on applying math concepts to basketball.

“It was just super interesting for me to learn coding and think like that through applying basketball,” Heiring said. “So it was a natural fit for me to gravitate toward that.

“I loved it and I realized that while my basketball playing career ended, I really wanted to stay involved with basketball after that.”

But Heiring graduated in May 2020 amid a global pandemic. She accepted a remote job crunching numbers at an auto insurance company and moved back to her hometown of Wayzata, Minnesota. She didn’t mind the work, but missed basketball so much that she reached out to Division III Macalester College in Saint Paul and asked coach Katie Kollar if she needed a hand.

It didn’t take long for Heiring to blow Kollar away with her basketball knowledge. Heiring made shot charts and identified strengths and areas of improvement for each player. She also created an assist matrix which showed where the team’s assists were coming from and, in turn, helped develop Macalester’s offensive sets.

“She’s very thoughtful and thorough,” Kollar said. “That was one of the things I really appreciated about her, too, is when she brought an idea to the table, I always knew that she actually thought it all the way through.”

When the Warriors opportunity came along, Heiring’ personality, basketball wits and knack for analyzing data sets stood out to Sidhu throughout the three-month interview process.

It can be hard to hire someone through a virtual interview process, Sidhu said.

“You’re betting on the person, you’re betting on whether they’re curious, you’re trying to identify if they’re a good person and if they’re smart and hard workers,” Sidhu said. “And to me, she checked those boxes off.”

Heiring packed up her belongings and moved to San Francisco in November 2021. Despite joining the team after the season started, she didn’t miss a beat.

Heiring is quiet and unassuming. But her voice is respected by some of the most influential people within the Warriors. On countless occasions, Kerr has called on Heiring to relay her findings. Several assistant coaches said they pepper Heiring with questions throughout the course of a season.

“Knowing that the coaches trust the numbers that you’re providing and your insight around them and how you kind of explain them to the coaches, I think that allows her to have a lot more confidence,” Fatoki said. “Now on the court [with the Warriors’ Summer League team] as she’s talking to the guys and saying those same things and being able to find her voice and communicate with them.”

Heiring said she still can’t believe that this is her life — especially since it was so different only 20 months ago.

“This is a total career path change,” she said. “I knew I wanted to work in basketball analytics but I didn’t know if it was possible because there’s not a ton of [those jobs available] within the NBA. So it’s hard to get into.

“Also, like, looking at people in those roles, it’s not a ton of people that look like me,” Heiring continued. “It [was] hard to envision myself in that.”

As for what’s next, Heiring said she’s still trying to figure that out. She loves her current role – and Sidhu said he can envision her one day overseeing a data department of her own. But Heiring is also open to exploring the possibility of being a full-time coach.

“It’s wherever she wants to go,” Sidhu said. “She has a bright future either way.”