When the retired basketball player Jared Jeffries first attended an e-sports tournament, last summer, he was stunned by what he saw. It was the Evolution Championship Series, known as Evo, an annual fighting-game tournament and one of the largest e-sports competitions in the world. It was held in the convention hall at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, in Las Vegas; an arena had been set up, with a ring in the center, as for a boxing match, but the lights were dimmed and a giant screen hung from the ceiling. The champion fighting-game player Hajime Taniguchi, who goes by Tokido, took out a tape measure before every match so to insure that the distance between his face and his monitor never changed. Jeffries spent a decade in the N.B.A., playing for the Washington Wizards, New York Knicks, Houston Rockets and Portland Trail Blazers, and the atmosphere at Evo reminded him of a playoff game. Watching Tokido, he thought of the obsessive-compulsive rituals he’d seen among fellow basketball players, such as the routines players perform before shooting free throws.
Just days before, Jeffries had left a promising front-office position in the N.B.A. to become president of the e-sports organization Echo Fox. Jeffries grew up in basketball-loving Indiana—in 2000, he was named Mr. Basketball, an honor given to Indiana’s top high-school player. He got a scholarship to Indiana University, and in 2002 he was drafted by the Wizards. After he retired, in 2013, he became a scout for the Denver Nuggets. In 2016, the team promoted him to director of pro personnel. Then, last spring, Jeffries had a conversation with the venture capitalist Stratton Sclavos, the former co-owner of the San Jose Sharks, of the National Hockey League. Jeffries met Sclavos a few years ago, through mutual friends. Their talk turned to Jeffries’s career. During his time in the N.B.A., Jeffries had grown accustomed to moving from city to city, and he mentioned to Sclavos that he’d been thinking about making another professional change. “Can you come to L.A.?” Sclavos asked. He had an idea.
Sclavos had recently invested in Echo Fox, which is co-owned by Rick Fox, another former N.B.A. player. Echo Fox fields e-sports teams in eleven different games—it’s as if the Mets, Jets, Nets, Islanders, Liberty, and New York Red Bulls were owned and operated by a single entity. The video-game competition industry has exploded in recent years: a report in January from Morgan Stanley predicted that e-sports will be worth about $1.5 billion by 2020. This week, the NBA 2K League, an e-sports league owned in part by the N.B.A. itself, held its first-ever draft, at Madison Square Garden. Sclavos wanted Echo Fox to be run in the same fashion as the most sophisticated professional sports franchises, and he believed that Jeffries’s experiences both as an athlete and an executive could help make that happen.
Jeffries was familiar with e-sports; while playing for the Knicks, he and his teammates Quentin Richardson, Malik Rose, and Eddy Curry would spend their free time playing World of Warcraft, a popular multiplayer fantasy game. But, as he told me recently, over lunch in midtown Manhattan, he didn’t know much about the business side of things. So, he began studying. He watched the video of a panel from the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He spoke to a former Major League Baseball owner who had invested in the industry. And he consulted friends of his from around the N.B.A. Some of them were less enthusiastic than others. Calvin Booth, a former teammate on the Wizards, “said I was an idiot,” Jeffries said. But he was excited about the unknown. “In e-sports, there is no model, you’re creating your own template for everything,” he said. He now oversees eleven teams and nearly fifty athletes—a label that Jeffries believes e-sports gamers deserve, “because of the dedication and talent it takes to play, and the required reaction time.”
Jake Fyfe, the general manager of Echo Fox’s League of Legends team, told me that he was skeptical at first that a basketball player, and an e-sports novice, could help. But then he and Jeffries started meeting regularly. Jeffries explained how, when he was with the Nuggets, he and his colleagues would pitch ownership on potential personnel additions by compiling pages of data—ages, family background, strengths, weaknesses. The approach served two purposes: it helped convince bosses to approve decisions, and, when a decision backfired, the information could be cued up as proof of process. “He showed me what it looks like to be running the front office of an N.B.A. team,” Fyfe said.
Before Jeffries arrived, most of Echo Fox’s gamers roomed with their teammates in company-owned houses. Jeffries began encouraging Echo Fox athletes to move out of those homes and instead live on their own. “I know, when I was a player, I wouldn’t have wanted to be playing with my teammates for twelve hours and then go home and spend another twelve hours with them,” he told Fyfe. Many Echo Fox players for the League of Legends team are Korean; Jeffries requested that the organization hire an assistant manager who could also serve as a Korean translator, and he hired a Korean chef to help the players feel more at home.
When I met Jeffries for lunch, he was carrying a briefcase full of laminated binders with pages of photos and statistics: “kill-to-death ratio,” “assist rate,” and “map awareness.” Those particular stats are publicly available; others listed in the binder were proprietary. Jeffries was using all of the data to search for a new gamer who could replace an Echo Fox athlete who had recently enlisted in the military. Did Jeffries understand what all the numbers meant? “Most,” he said. “But I’m smart enough to know when I’m not smart at something”—a line he would repeat more than once.
After every season, League of Legends teams are given an opportunity to reshape their rosters by signing players not under contract with other teams. That free-agency period begins in November, but Jeffries began meeting with Fyfe to discuss it in August. Echo Fox’s League of Legends team had failed to reach the playoffs in each of the last four seasons, and so, for three months, Jeffries and Fyfe convened every day in a conference room at the franchise’s spacious Beverly Hills office. Spreadsheets blanketed the table. They scribbled strategies on white boards. They watched tape and combed through statistics and ran roster simulations. Sometimes Fyfe would call up friends from other teams to try to learn if they were planning on keeping certain players. Ultimately, Echo Fox replaced their entire starting roster, signing five new League of Legends players, and hired a new coach. The team made it to the playoffs. On Saturday, they’ll square off against Clutch Gaming in a fight for third place.
