http://grantland.com/the-triangle/mark- ... racts-cba/
Imagine spending a dozen hours or more a day researching and watching the NBA in a country where the games come on at midnight and end at 7 a.m. and basketball is so disregarded that your home country cut the funding for its Olympic team. That should give you an idea of how unusual Deeks’s rise to prominence is.
He’s a self-made, self-employed lay-expert in the most confusing and misunderstood area of a sport that is barely more than a fringe curiosity in his home country. Somehow, Deeks, originally from “a small village in the English countryside that no one has ever heard of,” has managed to cultivate a web of contacts that give him not just salary information, but incentives, trade kickers, cap percentages, and all the cascading minutiae that goes into the NBA contract sausage.
During the NBA season, an average day for Deeks goes like this: Wake at around 2 p.m. Catch up on social media, emails, and the Internet. Write for several hours. Pick up his girlfriend from work. Maybe fill in at his old job, teaching an after-school science program. Then, when game time rolls around at about midnight, it’s taking notes and monitoring the discussion on social media until six or seven in the morning. Sleep. Repeat. “I have no concept of mornings or weekends.”
“I’ve been fascinated by the fact that it seems like he has better contacts than a lot of us,” said Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck, formerly of the L.A. Daily News and the New York Times. “There are plenty of guys who have been covering this league for years, who don’t have the info he has.”
