As recently as the 1990s, the NBA moved at a deliberate pace. Walk it up, feed your star, watch him work. Jordan’s final title-winning Bulls team averaged 96.7 points per game. Slowly, the game sped up. It began with Steve Nash and Mike D’Antoni in Phoenix. Then came the Warriors. Today, it’s not anomalous for a team to win 159–158, as the Rockets did last month. But in 2014–15, when Arseneault arrived in Reno, the NBA was still evolving into a pace-and-space league. The most prolific team the year before, the Clippers, averaged 107.9 points. Today that would rank 23rd in the league. Arseneault was bewildered by how he’d gotten the job. The Kings had flown him out, without asking for a résumé. Only later would he learn how they had found him: how Oliver, an analytics guru, had taken the advice of a fan named Jack Patton, a devotee of the System. How Oliver had grabbed Arseneault’s contact info off the Web. How Sacramento brass had interviewed roughly 10 other candidates but focused on him because, as Oliver says, “We really wanted to experiment.”