BYU basketball has hired another staff member from the NBA

New BYU Cougars men’s basketball coach Kevin Young has been trying to bring an NBA feel to his new job, and on Friday the program announced a new hire from the league.

Akash Sebastian will be joining Young and the Cougars as the director of analytics and strategy after working as a coaching analyst with the Phoenix Suns for the past two years.

That, of course, makes it a reunion for Young and Sebastian, as Young was with the Suns from 2020 until getting hired by BYU in the spring.

“I’m very excited to have Akash with us here at BYU,” Young said in a statement. “We’ve worked closely together over the past two years in the NBA. He was instrumental in a lot of the success we had with the Phoenix Suns, working hard behind the scenes to move the needle.

“He knows how to challenge my thinking as we strive for efficiency, both on the team level and the player level. His ability to build things out from a coding and programming standpoint will also be instrumental as we build our analytics infrastructure.”

Prior to his time with the Suns, Sebastian was a coaching analyst for the Utah Jazz for one season and an intern with the Sacramento Kings before that.

BYU also included in Friday’s announcement that Samantha Young (no relation to the head coach) has been hired as the program’s executive assistant and that former player Nate Austin and Michael Davie will be returning as director of basketball operations and director of strength and conditioning and sports science, respectively.