Technology is a major topic in the fourth episode of “The Boardroom,” the sports business docuseries starring Golden State Warriors superstar Kevin Durant.
The six-part project airing on subscription streaming service ESPN+ examines different facets of the modern athletic enterprise. This episode, which is scheduled to premier on Friday, examines how media and technology for training affect today’s athlete. “The Boardroom” is a joint production by ESPN and Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures.
Sitting at the head of the table is show host Jay Williams, a former Duke star and current ESPN analyst. Joining him are Durant, Warriors teammate Andre Iguodala, Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash, and Whoop co-founder and CEO Will Ahmed. Nash is also a Warriors player development consultant.
When asked about regularly being called “the second-best player in the world,” Durant said that at times he still takes it as a slight, fueling his motivation to improve.
“I work with Steve a lot, and I tend to lean on him when it comes to my development and what I need to do to get better,” Durant said. “We live in a world where there’s just so much technology, and we’re always looking for different ways to get better.”
Ahmed spoke about the goal of Whoop to unlock human performance and its physiological tracking. (Durant is a Whoop investor.) Iguodala detailed how he uses similar technology to gauge his fitness more objectively.
“I’m trying to figure out, like, ‘OK, I’m not working out as much as I used to. Am I in shape?’” Iguodala said. “Now all I have to do is put on a heart-rate monitor, and I can see, I can get my heart rate up to 140. I’m like, ‘OK, I got my heart rate up to 140. Now how long does it take me to get back to 120?’ I know if I’m in shape or not, and I can adjust accordingly.”
Basketball players tend to spend more of their offseason actually playing the game compared to many other sports. Summer pickup games at UCLA attract the NBA’s best players, and the private match ups often reach the public domain through Instagram clips.
“We have a long offseason in our sport, and our guys grew up playing the game,” Nash said. “Like Kevin said, it’s appropriate to play the game because it’s a game of rhythm, more so than any other sport.
“Fame is a currency, and everyone’s trading on fame in our industry. Everyone’s got a camera in our pocket. These guys have to navigate that way more than I had to or the generation before me ever had to.”