SAN FRANCISCO -- One of the things that most impressed Will Sheehey's coaches during his playing career was his court vision and the way he would see how the pieces moved. The former Indiana wing was sort of like a spy drone on a reconnaissance mission; coaches could send him running around the floor and he would come back to huddles with a photographic understanding of an opponent's weak points and ideas of how they could be attacked.

So it probably always made sense that Sheehey would find his way on to somebody's coaching staff, but it makes even more sense that he would enter that world in a less traditional, more progressive path. After winning a championship with the Golden State Warriors in 2021-22 as an assistant video coordinator, Sheehey was promoted to player development analyst and is in his second year on the job. The job didn't really exist before Sheehey held it, because his job is to harness the kind of video and data that has only been available in recent years, and try to use that not only for overarching team strategy, but for individual player development.

"I think one thing a lot of analyst teams are missing is how do we get our individual players better?" Sheehey said before a Warriors-Pacers game in March. "We do everything from a strategy lens of, ‘What play should we run, what defense should we run?' But there’s some nuanced things of, 'OK, this guy in this particular play, what does he typically do and how can we get him to get better at those exact skills inside of the play?' So that’s what I do, is I look at everything on an individual level on each of our individual guys and what their strengths and weaknesses are, and then design their workouts based on those."

Sheehey didn't have his heart set on coaching. He was trying to extend his playing career as far as it would go. After four years at Indiana in which he scored over 1,000 points, helped lead the Hoosiers to the 2013 Big Ten title and back-to-back Sweet 16 runs, and earned Big Ten Sixth Man of the Year honors in 2012-13, Sheehey bounced around American and European leagues for six years. He got three NBA Summer League invites and served stints with three NBA G-League – then D-League – teams, the Los Angeles D-Fenders, Fort Wayne Mad Ants and Raptors 905, with which he won a D-League title in 2017. He also played in Montenegro, Greece, France, Portugal and Germany, including a short stint playing with former IU teammate Jordan Hulls for s. Oliver Wurzburg in Germany.

"Once I finished playing it was COVID time for the most part and I had a bunch of injuries and I couldn’t do it day after day," Sheehey said. "The style that I played it was really hard and running all around, I couldn’t really tone it down for myself, so I knew that I wouldn’t be playing at like half speed, so I decided to hang it up."

Sheehey's last team was in Portugal and he came back to the U.S. and got involved in technology marketing and sales, but before the 2021-22 NBA season he got a call from Seth Cooper, a former IU graduate assistant who has held various positions with the Warriors since 2019. He was a player development coach at the time, but spent two years coaching the Santa Cruz Warriors, Golden State's G-League team, and is now a Warriors assistant coach. Cooper told Sheehey there was an opening in the Warriors' video room.

"I obviously love basketball," Sheehey said. "I wanted to be around the game. I was like, 'Man, if I don’t at least try this, I’ll probably always regret it.' So I told myself if I didn’t get the job I’d probably continue on the career path it was on, but then I got it, so I decided to give it a shot."

He did get it, and it helped that Jama Mahlalela, who had been his coach at Raptors 905, was an assistant coach at the time and interviewed Sheehey. And less than a year after his hiring was announced, he found himself on the floor celebrating the Warriors' fourth NBA title since 2015.

"My first year, we won, which was insane," Sheehey said. "I got so lucky from the first day working here. Winning the championship. The timeline of a lot of guys coming into the league to finally winning a championship can be 10 years, 20 years or you never win one. So it was super cool to see things you work on and come to fruition. Winning at the end, it’s a dream, coach’s dream."

But after his contributions in Year 1, the Warriors felt like there was more Sheehey could do. They liked that he embraced analytics, data and video, but also had enough playing experience to relate to players. The Warriors are a progressive franchise in a progressive town, and their dynasty led by Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green helped change the game. So they worked out a vision with Sheehey about how his job would work to connect analytics to players, and they've been thrilled with the results.

"Will’s been fantastic," Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. "He’s in a role right now where he’s really connecting analytics with the game film. He works his tail off. He basically breaks down every single play for us defensively and he matches our tape with our coverage mistakes with our analytics. ... Will is really helping us figure out what matters and what doesn’t analytically. He’s just got a great way about him because he played. He understands the game from a player's standpoint, but also from a numbers standpoint. Will’s got a really bright future."

But figuring out the present is a difficult enough task, especially with technology changing so quickly and the game being forced to change with it.

"It’s really tough," Sheehey said. "There’s so much data. There’s so much information. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a computer now and they have a lot of the same access to the same things we have access to. It’s a matter of digesting what you think is important, what your organization thinks is important and having a North Star you’re all kind of going toward and kind of filtering out the rest of the noise because it can be distracting for sure."

And Sheehey's north star is to take all of that new information and use it to show players how they can make their team better on a play-by-play basis. NBA offensive and defensive systems tend to be based more on reads and choices players make in the moment rather than on set plays, so a big part of Sheehey's job is showing the importance of correct reads.

"We have individual game plans defensively and offensively of what we’re trying to do," Sheehey said. "You have to look at it as, team wise, did we do it? So if you’re in the corner, and on a certain play you’re supposed to cut backdoor at a certain time, did you hold in the corner or did you cut backdoor? It’s like, those kind of little nuanced things. We might have scored on the play and everyone says, “Great, this is good.’ But if that player needs to make that read to cut and doesn’t, someone has to be looking at that to give them that."

Sheehey doesn't always work directly with players – sometimes there's a player development coach employing this directly in workouts – but he still gets plenty of time with them, and especially with the young guys. Veterans such as Curry, Thompson and Green understand a lot of the nuances, but young players such as former IU All-American Trayce Jackson-Davis could use the teaching, and Sheehey has been particularly impressed with how he's taken in knowledge. Jackson-Davis is averaging 7.6 points and 4.8 rebounds while shooting over 70% from the floor. Jackson-Davis, taken No. 57 overall in last year's draft, has won the backup center job behind Green and has gotten starts when Green has been out for injury or suspensions.

"As long as they’re open-minded good guys that work hard, it makes everything so much easier," Sheehey said. "A guy like Trayce is a coach’s dream to work with. Really coachable, works really hard. I personally gravitate toward working with him. Obviously he’s a fellow Hoosier. From a player standpoint, as long as they have mindset of growth and working really hard, it’s super easy."

Though Kerr thinks Sheehey has a bright future, Sheehey said he's not looking that far ahead at age 32. His path so far is untraditional, so he hasn't put too much thought into where it might take him.

"My wife gets mad at me because I'm so day-to-day all the time," Sheehey said. "I always just wake up and think, 'How do I get better today? How do I attack today and make today valuable?' I don’t really have one-, two- five-year horizons. I think there’s something really special about working with a player who doesn’t have the greatest skills on something and seeing them working on it every day and every day and every day and then it eventually comes through in the game and no one knows how it got there, it just is there. I would like to continue just working with players and having them get better at whatever that standpoint that is."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball Will Sheehey uses analytics to help the Warriors