Kirk Lacob from an article this spring:
"The hardest thing to do in sports is to question.
We have answers of how to play basketball, and we have a lot of great information, but we only move things forward when we ask the right questions, and it is hard to ask the right one."
So smart teams are actively looking for folks who can ask important, new questions?? Never seen an NBA team emphasize that on a job advertisement. Hardly ever even mentioned. It may be valued, but why so little public emphasis? Probably desire to keep that role for themselves and maybe overconfidence about their ability and performance in that sphere. How many people asking questions is enough? 1-3? 5? Why not 10 or more? Major work to think up new and important questions, try to answer many questions, reflect on them, compare / contrast, integrate, monitor etc. But if you are serious about analytics and the potential advantages, I'd think one should embrace the more work / more staff model, for the asking questions phase or the whole cycle, over "eh, the couple of us or a couple of us plus one more (especially a low or no pay intern) can handle it".