After making good on the wager, Lin Qi received the five-year contract and a sizable bonus.
For a twenty-nine-year-old who had still been a junior scout a year earlier, that money was enough to move into a bigger house, buy a nice car, and live comfortably.
But Lin Qi poured most of that money into something everyone in 1995 would have considered utterly absurd.
He was going to start a company.
Late that night, Lin Qi sat alone in his office, pondering a question that had troubled him for a long time.
What had brought him this far? His memories as a transmigrator.
But memories would run out.
Every action he took was like tossing a pebble into a lake. The ripples spread, making the future increasingly unclear.
In a few more years, how accurate would that "answer key" in his head still be?
He needed something. Something that would keep him ahead of everyone else even after his memories failed.
On a blank sheet of paper, Lin Qi wrote a term.
Data analytics.
In the summer of 1995, this field was a complete wasteland in the NBA. Every general manager in the league still judged players through scouts' eyes, subjective intuition, players' height and weight, and the points-per-game figures in newspapers. No one knew what "defensive efficiency," "true shooting percentage," or "per-100-possession adjustments" meant.
But Lin Qi knew that, more than a decade later, a way of thinking called "Moneyball" would sweep through the basketball world like a tsunami, allowing teams armed with mathematics and models to grind opponents who still relied on intuition into the dirt.
What he wanted to do was bring that tsunami forward by ten years.
He knew better than anyone that this undertaking had one fatal pitfall... he absolutely could not set up this company in the Boston Celtics' name.
The reason was simple. The NBA was a competitive sport. If the Celtics, as one of its competitors, also controlled an underlying data system they could sell to the entire league, they would be "playing referee and athlete while selling stopwatches on the side." Other teams would immediately band together and complain to Stern: could Boston alter the data behind the scenes? Could they withhold the most crucial analysis for their own use? Stern would not tolerate that kind of conflict of interest for a minute. An astronomical fine would come down in no time.
Lin Qi registered a fully independent technology company in Delaware, America's famous haven for privacy and tax avoidance. The company had no ownership affiliation with the Celtics whatsoever. Lin Qi did not serve as its legal representative or CEO, and his name did not even appear in its business registration... he held shares behind the scenes through an undisclosed trust. One of the eccentric talents he was about to recruit would be listed as its founder and CEO.
And on this company's client list, the Boston Celtics were merely its first, full-paying VIP client.
A purely third-party software vendor and one of its ordinary clients. Nothing more. Legally, it was clean and unassailable.
Only after building that protective wall did Lin Qi feel comfortable beginning to scoop people up.
He scooped up the eccentric talents the world currently dismissed as "programmers with high test scores and no practical ability, peddling mumbo jumbo," but who would found entire schools of thought in the future.
For the first, he flew to the University of Virginia.
In a laboratory piled with scratch paper and environmental engineering models, he found Dean Oliver, who had just earned his doctorate.
At this point, Oliver was not involved in basketball circles at all. He was an academic unknown who studied wastewater treatment by day and only used statistical models to deconstruct basketball in his spare time, writing articles no one read.
"Dean, let me ask you something." In that little laboratory, Lin Qi tapped the blackboard. "What does the entire league use to judge a player right now? Points, rebounds, and assists per game. But those numbers often lie."
Oliver raised his head.
"A player who scores twenty points on twenty-five shots, and a player who scores fifteen on just ten shots-the newspapers tell you the former is better." Lin Qi stared at him. "But you and I both know that's bullshit. Why can't we build something to calculate a player's actual efficiency? To calculate exactly how many points every shot, every possession of his brings his team? Why can't we break something as crude as 'shooting percentage' down into effective field goal percentage and true shooting percentage, break offense down into turnover rate, rebounding rate, and free throw rate, and quantify each one?"
Oliver's breathing suddenly quickened.
This was precisely what he had been quietly exploring alone in his spare time for years, only for the entire world to treat it as a joke. Yet the young general manager before him had casually voiced the most private, most exciting ideas in his head, one after another... and had even gone further than he had.
"What you're describing..." Oliver's voice trembled. "It can be modeled. Give me enough game records, and I can calculate all of it. But no professional team has ever been willing to hear me out."
"Now one is." Lin Qi pushed the contract toward him. The employer named on it was the company in Delaware. "Stop studying wastewater treatment. Come build the first basketball data modeling laboratory in human history. Everything you want to calculate can become a reality."
Oliver signed. The "Four Factors Theory" he would later propose would become the foundation of all future NBA data software.
The second was Jeff Sagarin.
This man had introduced complex network-ranking algorithms into sports evaluation. His "Sagarin Rankings" had gained some recognition in college sports, but the entire NBA establishment considered his mathematics "mumbo jumbo."
Once again, Lin Qi brought no player information. What he brought was another question.
"Jeff," Lin Qi said, getting straight to the point, "with five players on the court, basketball is the hardest sport on this planet in which to quantify individual contributions... because everything is interconnected. A player might have no eye-catching statistics at all, yet whenever he's on the court, the whole team plays better on both offense and defense. Conversely, some players put up gorgeous numbers but lose their man as soon as they step onto the court. Newspapers can't explain that, and neither can scouts."
Sagarin narrowed his eyes.
"Why can't we use an algorithm to isolate those 'interconnected effects'?" Lin Qi enunciated each word. "Take every player individually and calculate exactly how many more points his team scores and how many fewer it allows per hundred possessions with him on the court versus off it? Turn that invisible, intangible 'impact' into a precise number we can write on paper?"
Sagarin shot to his feet.
"Do you know what you're saying?" he practically shouted. "You're talking about a... a model that cuts through all the surface statistics and directly quantifies a player's true value! That's exactly what I've wanted to do, but no one has ever given me the chance!"
"Then come do it." Lin Qi smiled. "Build it at my company."
The original model that would later give rise to APM and real plus-minus currently existed only in the mind of this man dismissed as a charlatan. Now it had a chance to be born and enter the world ahead of time.
Sagarin signed the contract too.
The third was John Hollinger. Coincidentally, he too had come out of the University of Virginia, making him a fellow alumnus of Oliver's. At this point, he was merely a low-level media editor dissatisfied with traditional statistics, quietly working out a formula on paper.
That formula would later be called PER. But for now, it had yet to see the light of day. Lin Qi plucked this frustrated editor straight out of his newspaper cubicle.
Besides these three future founding fathers, Lin Qi also recruited several Silicon Valley computer geeks... they were experimenting with early digital software to cut game footage into clips, tagging every "pick-and-roll dive" and every "corner three." This was the prototype of the video analysis systems that would one day dominate the NBA.
He even sent an offer for a "remote data intern" position to a seventeen-year-old boy far away in Oklahoma who had just graduated from high school and spent all day absorbed in computers and spreadsheets.
That boy was named Sam Hinkie. No one knew what sort of seed Lin Qi was planting for more than a decade down the road.
When Lin Qi held the first closed-door meeting for these eccentric talents, he stood before the blackboard and addressed their shining eyes. "Gentlemen, those dinosaurs out there are still making decisions based on points-per-game figures in newspapers." He wrote "efficiency," "spacing," and "impact" on the board. "I don't want you to study any particular player. What I want you to do is create an entire language... a language that can describe the truth of basketball."
In the meeting room, the eccentric talents' blood ran hot. They had waited far too long for this day.
The company was quietly established under an unassuming name.
Lin Qi made no fanfare.
The first client was Paul Allen.
The Microsoft co-founder and Portland Trail Blazers owner was himself a geek obsessed with technology and data. When the company came calling with Oliver's modeling framework, Allen was fired up almost on the spot.
He did not necessarily understand basketball, but he understood "using data modeling to solve a complex problem" all too well... it was the instinct that had made his fortune at Microsoft. In his eyes, a team was fundamentally a complex system that could be optimized through data.
With a flourish of his pen, he became the company's first paying client. He did not even ask much about the shareholders behind it... for someone at his level, a useful tool was enough.
But the client Lin Qi found truly interesting was the second.
It was Jerry West, who ran the Lakers.
This traditionalist with the sharpest eye became its second professional-team buyer.
That night, Lin Qi stood at his office window, looking out at the lights of Boston.
Oliver, Sagarin, Hollinger... these eccentric talents currently dismissed as charlatans would continually build "rulers that revealed the truth" for the company. And as its most loyal VIP client, the Boston Celtics would always use the newest, most accurate one a step ahead of everyone else.
When the transmigrator's answer key in his head finally stopped working, this machine powered by mathematics and algorithms would take over from his memories and keep him ten years ahead of everyone else.
This was his real moat.
And the company also concealed a deeper purpose, one even Oliver and Sagarin knew nothing about.
Looking out at the arena belonging to the Gaston family, Lin Qi turned over a thought that even he considered distant.
He needed a team that truly belonged to him.
And that required money, a great, great deal of money...
Lin Qi withdrew his gaze and thought no further. That idea was too distant. If he voiced it now, even he would consider it a fool's dream.
He merely buried that seed silently in the deepest part of his heart.