It didn’t take long for the Kings to announce a replacement for the departing Roland Beech.

The Kings announced today that they have hired Luke Bornn as their new Vice President of Strategy and Analytics. If you haven’t heard that name before, that’s no surprise. Bornn has no background working in basketball, having recently served as the Head of Analytics for A.S. Roma, an Italian soccer team but he has co-authored 6 papers on basketball since 2014 and he’s also been a mainstay at the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference. He’s also been a statistics professor at Harvard University. Basically, the guy knows his stuff.

Perhaps the best thing to come from this press release is this:

That’s good news, as the Kings currently have one of the smallest front offices in the NBA. Beefing up the analytics department is a welcome step in the right direction.

James Ham was able to catch up with Bornn and talk to him about his new job. You can read the whole thing here but here’s an interesting snippet:

We’ll see what other moves the Kings make in terms of adding to their front office over the next few months, because given recent reports that the Kings might have reached out to Sam Hinkie, more could be coming.