Meet Ariana Andonian, the 31-year-old Blue Coats GM who was once thought to be the NBA’s only female scout

Ariana Andonian was in the depths of a 10-day negotiation on a potential three-team trade, with her Delaware Blue Coats vying to acquire the rights to Malcolm Hill. And when doubts that a late-August deal would materialize transformed into the realization that an agreement had clicked into place, Andonian felt a satisfying jolt.

“I was like, ‘This is a little bit of a high,’” Andonian recently told The Inquirer.

That was Andonian’s first major move as the general manager of the 76ers’ G League affiliate, a position she took on one year after joining the organization as a Sixers vice president of player personnel.

She is now responsible for building and managing the Blue Coats’ roster, with a goal of recapturing team success and identifying players who can eventually help the Sixers.

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Andonian quickly rose up the NBA scouting ranks, having worked for the Memphis Grizzlies under general manager Zach Kleiman and the Houston Rockets under Daryl Morey, who is now the Sixers’ president of basketball operations. Her mentors also include the legendary Mike Krzyzewski and current Duke coach Jon Scheyer, for whom she consulted while earning her master’s degree in business administration at the university.

Morey believes that Andonian, 31, has the potential to become an NBA lead executive. Her achievements further illustrate that women can thrive in front-office leadership roles. Now, she gets to immerse herself in the league that exists to develop talent in all positions — including hers.

“There’s no other role in the organization that is like the G League GM,” Andonian said. “It’s a great opportunity for growth. It’s a great opportunity to try your ideas and see how they go and test them out in ways that you couldn’t do anywhere else.”

Andonian is the latest member of the Sixers’ front office to hold this title, joining Jameer Nelson, Prosper Karangwa, and Elton Brand. She did not necessarily expect this path when she was hired last year to run the Sixers’ professional scouting group, which evaluates players on other NBA teams, international free agents, and G League players.

When Nelson was promoted to assistant general manager in May, however, Andonian was the natural fit to slide into his vacated role while maintaining her Sixers duties. She already spent significant time in Wilmington at Blue Coats games and had relationships with players and staff at that level. And her Sixers colleagues “raved” about the value of their experience.

“They were all very adamant,” she said, “that it was a really cool place where you get to actually do a lot of tasks. … Once we got to the point where it was, like, ‘OK, I’m going to do this,’ I think the wheels were just turning.”

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It is a notable step for Andonian, who can trace her passion for basketball to growing up in Los Angeles during the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant era — and in an Armenian family and community that was “super obsessed” with the sport.

“There was a point where it was a little bit more than just a fandom,” Andonian said. “I think people were like, ‘Wow, she really likes to know what’s going on.’”

Andonian stopped playing once she began college at Southern Cal, but she still felt the urge to stay around the game. She was unaware of the inner workings of NBA front offices until an internship with Los Angeles Clippers, when she noticed names under a “basketball operations” department label on a lunch sign-in sheet at the facility’s cafeteria.

She began scouring team directories, sending blind emails asking if the recipient would hop on the phone to share more about his or her career journey and current job responsibilities.

She furthered her in-college experience by working for USC’s athletic department and interning at the sports and entertainment talent agency Wasserman, where her desk was conveniently located next to the basketball division. She was in talks with the Indiana Pacers about a postgraduate internship on the organization’s basketball side.

Then, Andonian serendipitously crossed paths with Morey.

His then-teenage daughter, Karen, was taking college visits and planned to stop by USC’s campus. An alumnae of Andonian’s sorority — who that year was working with Morey on the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference — asked if any current students were available to give the family a tour. Andonian volunteered. She eventually floated to Morey that she was interested in pursuing an NBA career and joined the family for lunch.

Morey asked if Andonian had any scouting samples because the Rockets were hiring an intern in that department. She had several that she had created in her spare time, which Morey forwarded to then-executive vice president of basketball operations Gersson Rosas.

Andonian got an interview and the gig.

“Ariana would have made it no matter what,” Morey recently told The Inquirer. “She’s got the drive and the skills to do that. … [But] when the opportunity comes, just be like a rottweiler. Just grab it, and don’t let go.”

Andonian credits Rosas — and the late, deeply respected scout Brent “BJ” Johnson — with helping her learn the fundamentals of evaluating players and projecting how their skills and the NBA game itself will evolve. She was encouraged to craft her own viewpoint by balancing the eye test with analytics and to learn from past mistakes through exercises such as years-later redrafts.

When Andonian’s internship concluded, Morey hired her as a full-time scout for Houston. By Year 3, she was coordinating the Rockets’ entire college scouting group — at age 23.

“It was almost like I had to tell her when she had to stop watching video,” Morey said. “… She picked up things quick and fit into a group.”

Then Andonian opted to return to school to complete her MBA. When informed that Andonian had arrived on Duke’s campus and could assist its powerhouse men’s basketball program, Scheyer’s initial reaction was, “This is pretty random. Is all this legit?”

“And then you meet her,” the coach recently said by phone, “and you realize she is all about ball.”

Duke tasked Andonian with leading its high school scouting group, with a goal of unearthing less-renowned sophomores and juniors who could complement the five-star recruits the Blue Devils automatically attract.

She built contacts and gathered intel along the AAU circuit. She observed how Krzyzewski motivated players, ran practices, and carried himself around various members of the program. Andonian also relayed how the school’s NBA prospects — future top-10 draft picks Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett, and Cam Reddish were on the roster at the time — were viewed by the league, which the coaching staff could then “communicate back to the player in a way that he could understand, but wasn’t hurtful to him in any way,” she said.

“Being able to not just fall in love with their talent,” Scheyer added, “but say, ‘All right, these are the areas they need to improve to be ready-made pros.’ … She was able to see them through a different lens. I think that really helped us, and helped me coach those guys better.”

Scheyer said he wishes he could have kept Andonian on staff after she finished her graduate degree, but knew “it wasn’t a matter of if she was going back to the NBA. It was a matter of where.” Morey also hoped to rehire her. But she told Morey that she wanted to learn from others in the league and joined a Memphis front office building an exciting young team through the draft.

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There, she oversaw the high school and international scouting arms and started traveling with the Grizzlies in a more team-facing role. Her quintessential overseas scouting story was watching a game in Serbia — an atmosphere comparable to the intensity of Philly.

She became even more comfortable stating her case to the front-office group, including when she helped persuade Kleiman to draft a then-unknown Turkish forward, Tarik Biberovic, in the second round in 2023. Biberovic has since developed into a EuroLeague starter for Fenerbahçe in his home country and could make the leap to the NBA.

“Getting that little win was really cool,” Andonian said. “… A bunch of people were like, ‘Wow, no one really knew this guy.’”

Andonian has carved out her career while navigating a male-dominated industry. In 2017, she was the league’s only female scout, according to a Bleacher Report story about women in prominent NBA positions.

Now, there are enough women in various front-office roles to create a group chat, where they can candidly discuss experiences and network in-person at events at the summer league and All-Star weekend. Andonian is the G League’s third female general manager, joining the Cleveland Charge’s Liron Fanan and Salt Lake Stars’ Katie Benzan.

“We just continue to build each other up,” Andonian said. “Hopefully, we all continue to succeed. Because I think that’s the easiest way to set an example, and the easiest way for more to come in and feel like this is something that women can do. There isn’t really that much of a question about it, because look how many are doing it.”

The expectation is for Andonian to spearhead a bounce-back season for the Blue Coats, who won the 2023 G League title but slipped to a 14-20 record last season. There also is a goal to maintain synergy with the Sixers, especially for the players on two-way contracts who will spend time with both teams.

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So Andonian’s early days have been spent building out the roster, including players invited to the Sixers’ training camp on Exhibit 10 contracts. She has been interviewing head coaching candidates, after Mike Longabardi was promoted to an assistant on Nick Nurse’s Sixers staff. She is learning how to manage several departments, noting that “my phone rings way more than before.”

“I feel like, every five minutes, I’m like, ‘Oh, I have seven missed calls from so many different people,’” she added.

She knows she can tap into the knowledge of those who previously held this job, referencing recent conversations with Nelson about potential player fits and how to best value trade assets. She appreciates that Morey balances collaborative support and trusting her to work through her own decisions.

Morey, in turn, likes that Andonian will engage in “spirited” debates and is not afraid to “overrule” him about players. For instance, Morey is more lenient on taking a chance on G League players with a checkered off-court past, while Andonian is less inclined.

“I learn better by being challenged by someone back,” Morey said, “and she does that better than anyone right now.”

So when Andonian wanted to pursue the three-way trade for the rights to Hill, she pulled it off. The emotional high launched her into this new role. And now, she gets to further develop herself in basketball’s developmental league.

“The fruits are already bearing of why people think this is such great experience,” she said.