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By Daniel P. Smith

Dave Lewin ’09 had only recently washed the champagne out of his hair when he walked into the Boston Celtics practice facility on the morning of June 18, 2024.

Less than twelve hours after the Celtics clinched the 2024 NBA title with a 106-88 victory over the Dallas Mavericks, Lewin leaned against a gymnasium wall as Celtics staff put an NBA hopeful through a series of basketball drills. The NBA Draft was eight days away and Lewin, the assistant general manager of the Celtics, was already looking ahead.

That’s the reality of this job,” Lewin says. “Championship or not, next season’s happening and we need to be ready for it.

Lewin, of course, isn’t complaining. This is precisely what he wanted.

Targeting a career in pro sports

In his Boston-bred childhood, Lewin dreamed of being something different from his peers. While others fantasized about becoming a Boston sports legend like Larry Bird or Tom Brady, Lewin was more drawn to those who assembled the city’s title teams, individuals like Celtics executive Red Auerbach or Theo Epstein, the hometown wonderkid who halted the Red Sox’s eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004. In fact, when Lewin played video games like NBA Live or Madden, he devoted his time to assembling rosters through trades and signings before simulating the games.

“That was the perspective I operated from,” Lewin says, crediting Boston’s “intellectual fandom” for stoking his interest in front office work. “From a young age, I was aware that there were people whose job it was to find the right players and put together the roster.”

When it came time for college, Lewin’s Harvard-educated parents encouraged him to select an undergraduate-focused liberal arts school. Macalester appealed with its strong academics and invitation to play collegiate football.

By his sophomore year at Mac, Lewin, a math and econ double major, had become even more fanatical about data’s role in athletic contexts. He embraced every opportunity to apply statistical concepts and techniques to team sports, including tackling independent projects with Vittorio Addona, a professor in the Math, Statistics, and Computer Science Department whose research includes sports statistics.

“That was me taking advantage of what makes Mac special: the opportunity to get help from a talented professor in my field of interest,” Lewin says of Addona.

Paying his dues

As Moneyball—a data-driven approach to evaluate players—further infiltrated professional sports, Lewin noted franchises’ rising interest in “quantitatively oriented” individuals and shared his work with Addona to generate opportunities with NBA teams. He landed summer internships with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007 and 2008, supporting a front office eager to create meaning out of basketball data and capitalize on the generational talent of a young LeBron James.

Back at Mac, meanwhile, Lewin traded the gridiron for the hardwood as his fascination with basketball swelled. He earned a spot on the basketball team and his two years as a reserve guard with the Scots delivered a heightened knowledge of the game’s tactics and schemes, which only sharpened his analytics work.

“When I think of Dave, the first word that comes to mind is brilliance,” says Abe Woldeslassie ’08, Mac’s current head basketball coach and Lewin’s former teammate. “He was thinking about basketball stats in a way few others were back then.”

Over the last dozen years, Lewin has filled a variety of roles for the Celtics related to scouting, salary cap, strategy, and analytics. He also had a three-year stint as general manager of the Celtics’ G-League (minor league) team, the Maine Red Claws. There, given an organizational edict to find the best up-and-coming coaches, he was a part of hiring a young assistant coach from tiny Fairmont State University. Eight years later, that coach, Joe Mazzulla, steered the Celtics to a league-leading eighteenth championship.

Constructing a champion

A naturally competitive person, Lewin relishes the challenge of trying to build the best possible team within the constraints of the NBA salary cap, one intentionally designed to promote parity. He spends his days collecting insights from coaches, players, scouts, and other front office peers and poring over spreadsheets of player information—a vital grind to ensure the Celtics possess every ounce of information necessary to make shrewd personnel decisions in the draft, free agency, and trade market.

“My job is a lot like the class you take in college in which the entire grade is the final exam,” says Lewin, who was promoted to assistant general manager in 2022. “You prepare for the big decisions over months and years, but all anyone will care about is whether you get those couple of big decisions a year right.”

Given the Celtics’ success over the last dozen years—six Eastern Conference Finals appearances, two NBA Finals runs, and one title—Lewin enjoys stability rare to find in pro sports. He’s also earned accelerating attention. In August, The Athletic named Lewin to its list of forty prominent NBA coaches, executives, managers, and influencers under age forty, and his name frequently arises when front office positions open elsewhere around the NBA.

“Long term, who knows what happens,” Lewin says of someday leading an NBA franchise. “Right now, I just know I’m blessed to do this in my hometown as part of a high-level team alongside great people.”

Daniel P. Smith is an independent writer based in Chicago and frequent contributor to Macalester Today.