"The data that they're probably getting from Synergy, every NBA team could have access to it if they want to pay for it," the staffer told ESPN. "But there's nothing that the Knicks would be getting that Synergy only provides them. Really, we're all using the same data. We all have access to the same data. There's no data that one team is getting that another team can't get. It's just about how you're using it."
A second analytics staffer for an NBA team expressed a similar sentiment.
"The videos are not confidential," the second staffer told ESPN. "It's NBA game video; you can get it from anywhere. The only aspect that I think is that you can make custom playlists in Synergy -- like putting together only certain clips. You could maybe glean something from that."
"But none of the clips or the stats are confidential," the second staffer said. "The only thing I could think of is how you're organizing them, but to sue someone over that is kind of ridiculous."
Robert Boland, a professor of sports law at Seton Hall University Law School who also maintains a practice focused on sports labor and governance issues, said the same.
"If you were concerned about privacy and the loss of proprietary information, the last place you would be pursuing that is in a court proceeding seeking only monetary damages -- because whether it's actually proprietary is going to be an issue," Boland said.
"You have to prove your damages in this circumstance and you're going to have to tell the court, and by extension the public, what they took from you and what its value was. So more of that becomes public, which likely means the Knicks don't care about it. I'm assuming by the time we get through the court hearings, all this information will be out of date. I'm not sure the subject matter is proprietary or that it's even timely anymore."
"I think this is a complete middle finger from Dolan to Larry Tanenbaum -- and I think it's nothing more than that," one Eastern Conference executive told ESPN.
A Western Conference executive made similar remarks, telling ESPN, "In the game of basketball, coaches' intellectual property is their brain -- and that goes from team to team all the time. When players leave teams, they often take the playbook with them and that's way more important than what [Azotam allegedly] did.
"I don't know anyone who takes this lawsuit that seriously."
Another Western Conference executive told ESPN, "I don't understand how you could get to this place where suing is productive and likely to be successful."