May 25, 2023
Locked on Women’s Basketball: Building a championship contender with Atlanta Dream GM Dan Padover
By The Next
Howard and Dan Padover chat about how he started his career in basketball — Atlanta Dream and Allisha Gray's game
It’s time for another Locked on Women’s Basketball podcast episode. Host, Howard Megdal, is joined by Atlanta Dream general manager Dan Padover, who has created an utterly fascinating roster in Atlanta, with the Dream positioned to make noise not only this season but for many years to come. Dan’s path to the GM seat is examined while the two take turns excavating the hidden treasures in the stats of Allisha Gray, Cheyenne Parker, AD Durr and much more.
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Dan Padover talks about how his career started in basketball:
“Yeah, my senior year at the University of Connecticut, I helped out around the video room a good amount and just cutting up film and doing a lot of little things. And I started seeing around the teams and that was when people were starting to get some notoriety, like Spoelstra was coming up as a head coach, Mike Brown. So it was starting to be that you didn’t necessarily have to be a former player to try and make a profession out of this and that a lot of the non former players were coming up through the video room. So I would say, in my senior year of college, I started to get the idea that there actually may be a career path through this, albeit I knew it was going to be an extremely difficult one. But I thought that there may be a chance and my first real big break was the first year out of college.
I was afforded a really what it was a year-long internship with the Philadelphia 76ers. And the only reason I got it, quite frankly, is because it was unpaid, and they needed somebody who was local, I could live at home and commute every day. And you know, at 22, I was sitting in a film room with Doug Collins, Brian James, Aaron McKee, Michael Curry, and ironically not, the fourth assistant on that team was Quin Snyder, who’s now the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. So yeah, it’s a very small world and it’s really true that, like, depending on the twister journey take, you can go down a different path.”
Dan Padover talks about having the opportunity to get a talented player like Allisha Gray:
“Yeah, so I don’t think we looked at it as far as, like, number one or number two. I think we looked at it more to your first point of we have an opportunity to get an extremely talented player who may be, to your point, because of the way she goes about things, underrated. When you look at it from a pure data metric standpoint, is extremely, extremely efficient and also impacts the game in an exceptional amount of ways. And for whatever reason, probably some valid some not doesn’t get the same notoriety that some of those other players that you mentioned.
But to us that doesn’t matter. Notoriety doesn’t matter. It’s who can help you win more. And I think given what we went to do to go out and get her, we believe she can help us win more. And we’re super excited to have her obviously had a great game the other night, not going to put that type of pressure on her for the rest of the season, hopefully. But we’ve been ecstatic with the player she is. And just as important, we had an idea of the person that she is, and she’s shown that 10-fold as well.”
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