Wolves analyst charged with stealing data, fired
Baxter Holmes, ESPN Senior WriterMar 20, 2024, 07:18 PM ET Shut Baxter Holmes (@Baxter) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Cases. A The Minnesota Timberwolves employee used to be fired, arrested
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Baxter Holmes, ESPN Senior WriterMar 20, 2024, 07:18 PM ET
A The Minnesota Timberwolves employee used to be fired, arrested and charged with prison third-level burglary for allegedly stealing hundreds of internal recordsdata, along with “strategic NBA info,” from a crew govt, in accordance with a prison criticism filed Wednesday and obtained by ESPN.
Somak Sarkar, 33, who previously served as a educating analyst for the Timberwolves, is in custody and faces a court listening to Thursday afternoon in Minnesota. An attorney wasn’t listed for him as of Wednesday afternoon.
The Timberwolves told ESPN that they were attentive to the allegations and had no additional comment at the moment. A source told ESPN that the crew would no longer pursue prison expenses.
On Feb. 2, the criticism says, Sachin Gupta, a Timberwolves govt vice president who oversees the crew’s analytics department, left a exhausting pressure connected to a notebook computer in his location of work at the Aim Heart in downtown Minneapolis.
That pressure contained Gupta’s personal financial info as well to personal info for the crew, along with employment and player contracts.
When Gupta returned to work on Feb. 5, the exhausting pressure used to be missing, and subsequent surveillance reviewed by safety printed that Sarkar had twice entered Gupta’s location of work on Feb. 3 “after looking out out for to uncover about if somebody could well perhaps well uncover about him,” the criticism says. “He then left.”
Sarkar used to be fired straight away, the criticism says.
One other employee used to be in a region to accumulate larger the exhausting pressure from Sarkar, and the crew certain, after a forensic analysis, that he had accessed larger than 5,000 recordsdata and downloaded them onto one more instrument.
Sarkar used to be arrested Monday, and police executed a search warrant at his house, where they stumbled on numerous exhausting drives, a computer and three capsules. A second warrant printed that one of the most units contained info from Gupta’s exhausting pressure.
When wondered by police, Sarkar stated that, as a member of the educating workers, he had the exhausting pressure “to position some stuff on it,” but he forgot to return it.
The criticism notorious Sarkar had been transferred out of Gupta’s department in August 2023 and to the educating workers attributable to glum job performance.
In protecting along with his LinkedIn profile, Sarkar joined the Timberwolves in August 2021 and previously worked in analytics-connected roles at the New York Knicks and the New Orleans Pelicans. He furthermore worked as a basketball operations intern for the Houston Rockets from October 2012 to June 2013.