A Minnesota Timberwolves worker was fired, arrested and charged with felony third-degree housebreaking for allegedly stealing 1000’s of inner recordsdata, together with “strategic NBA data,” from a staff govt, in line with a felony grievance filed Wednesday and obtained by ESPN.
Somak Sarkar, 33, who beforehand served as a training analyst for the Timberwolves, is in custody and faces a courtroom listening to Thursday afternoon in Minnesota. An legal professional wasn’t listed for him as of Wednesday afternoon.
The Timberwolves informed ESPN that they had been conscious of the allegations and had no additional remark right now. A supply informed ESPN that the staff wouldn’t pursue felony costs.
On Feb. 2, the grievance says, Sachin Gupta, a Timberwolves govt vice chairman who oversees the staff’s analytics division, left a tough drive linked to a laptop computer in his workplace on the Goal Heart in downtown Minneapolis.
That drive contained Gupta’s private monetary data in addition to personal data for the staff, together with employment and participant contracts.
When Gupta returned to work on Feb. 5, the exhausting drive was lacking, and subsequent surveillance reviewed by safety revealed that Sarkar had twice entered Gupta’s workplace on Feb. 3 “after trying to see if anybody may see him,” the grievance says. “He then left.”
Sarkar was fired instantly, the grievance says.
One other worker was in a position to get better the exhausting drive from Sarkar, and the staff decided, after a forensic evaluation, that he had accessed greater than 5,000 recordsdata and downloaded them onto one other gadget.
Sarkar was arrested Monday, and police executed a search warrant at his residence, the place they discovered a number of exhausting drives, a pc and three tablets. A second warrant revealed that one of many units contained data from Gupta’s exhausting drive.
When questioned by police, Sarkar mentioned that, as a member of the teaching workers, he had the exhausting drive “to place some stuff on it,” however he forgot to return it.
The grievance famous Sarkar had been transferred out of Gupta’s division in August 2023 and to the teaching workers due to poor job efficiency.
Based on his LinkedIn profile, Sarkar joined the Timberwolves in August 2021 and beforehand labored in analytics-related roles on the New York Knicks and the New Orleans Pelicans. He additionally labored as a basketball operations intern for the Houston Rockets from October 2012 to June 2013.