The world of sports has become a game of numbers. Driven by undeniable evolutions in performance tangibly influenced by such efforts, the successful marriage of analytical evaluation has enjoyed an amazing journey, from an eccentric fascination to a progressive experiment to an industrial necessity. Teams are in the business of research, and many are dedicating substantial budget to keep up with any and everything you might find in use by the competition.
In the NBA, teams are taking it step further, not only by pushing analytic icons into executive offices, but also by pushing analytic limits in empowering their visions for tomorrow. Consider the rise of SportVU. The flurry of headlines revolving around this application’s attachment to the game of basketball chronicles that marriage, and does so in an intense eight-month span of time.
Start at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, hosted by the city of Boston. The most popular stop for NBA number crunchers during the offseason was highlighted by a presentation from Philip Maymin from the NYU-Polytechnic Institute. Maymin presented an abstract study he had been conducting for STATS LLC, the stat-serving giant utilized by every major sports organization and league in the business, built on a system of observational cameras originally designed and utilized in the military for missile tracking.
During the 2011-12 season, SportVU integrated these systems into various NBA arenas to establish a system of player tracking, capturing data from 233 regular- and post-season games focused on half-court basketball situations. Maymin also established a system of identifying and tracking key events related to individual play, including a variety of items (including starting spots, trajectories, timing and acceleration data, burst and stop points, and more). This data was paired with results (shot attempts, conversions, locations, rebounds, etc) to create the first comprehensive player tracking system in the history of professional sports.
The presentation caught the attention of more than a few NBA executives, and when word reached them all that several were counted as early adopters, the league and it’s support system came running to do the same. The forward-thinking team at Grantland – led by an NBA-obsessed Bill Simmons (counting writer Zach Lowe, a Yahoo stalwart known for analytic savvy, as one of his first hires) – put the spotlight on SportVU shortly after, and thus began the relationship between one of the most popular sites on the internet and tracking technologies. Tech blogs (like Fast Company) followed, taking the dive into coverage of the exciting new application of tracking tech.
Shortly after, word came from the NBA that SportVU systems would be installed in all 30 NBA arenas for the coming 2013-14 season, and the secret weapon of the game’s most powerful organizations was unleashed on the world. Shocking no one, Duke University became the first college organization to bring SportVU to a university.
The Worldwide Leader comes back into the picture, reporting the use of SportVU for several college teams that happen to play in NBA arenas manned with the system, and puts SportVU on the front line via the Grantland NBA Previews from Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose, featuring color-coded shot charts built via SportVU analysis by Harvard geography Ph.D. Kirk Goldsberry.
The best part of the story: where we stand today. John Hollinger, a product of the original analytics wave at ESPN who now serves as the VP of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, told reporters:
“(SportVU) is going to have a big impact, and the scary thing is, we don’t know how. It’s too early. I just hope I figure it out before everybody else does.”
Goldsberry has applied a fresh take on an established application – the shot chart – and it is just one public display we’ve seen thus far that implicates the power of this system. The NBA has announced it will also leverage SportVU to evaluate referee performance. Three of eight presentations at the MIT Sloan Conference utilized SportVU and may provide some insight on potential utilization by NBA teams. Beyond those three sources, we have little-to-no insight available on the way teams plan to use this technology moving forward.
We know teams will be using SportVU. We don’t know how.
If we found the luck of Hollinger (earning a position of NBA power) and owned a set of SportVU keys… we might consider these three applications as potential sources of immediate benefit.
The influence of SportVU is already being felt in the world of football via the public broadcast. A variety of statistical reports are produced in real-time, and several broadcast partners for the international leagues are leveraging those innovations to produce dynamic stat presentations during the game.
In the past, both leagues and broadcast partners have been somewhat hesitant to embrace such offerings. For instance, stats have evolved in baseball over the course of two decades, a process stalled by the lack of comfort in metrics that lacked intuitive understanding and the lack of faith in their potential gifts by those working in baseball. It took years for this approach to gain consideration – much less acceptance and utilization. Today, many still struggle to embrace a new way of evaluation (see any headline focused on instant replay as proof) and the statistical presentation of baseball is still considered an eccentric food for the geeky minority.
Through international football and basketball, we are witnessing a new evolution in which fringe statistical analysis can be pushed, presented and absorbed with ease. Complex tech produces simple report, and does so in real-time. Casual and hardcore fans alike can appreciate the stats made capable by SportVU, and the rapid turnaround plays perfectly for the broadcast effort.
The image above points to our second suggested application for SportVU in the NBA, where such an image driven by such data can lead to insightful views on team building.
That image is from the preview of the Brooklyn Nets aired via YouTube by Grantland, featuring an interpretation of SportVU data visualized by the aforementioned Kirk Goldsberry. In layman’s terms, it’s a glorified shot chart, combining the location of the player upon shooting with color-coded dots, the color indicating the player’s shooting percentage from that location. The viewer gets a multitude of intuitive information from these graphics: where the player prefers to do work, other areas where the player may roam, how the player performs from those areas as well as areas where the player works to perform and struggles. It’s simple, direct and extremely engaging.
However, consider the view presented for the Nets. Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose took those graphics for four of the five starters for the Nets, including everyone but point guard Deron Williams. Presented in this fashion, you can see why the hopes are high in Brooklyn. This team can match almost any roster not located in Florida with name power… but consider the potential court chemistry of this crew. Overlap those four visuals and nearly every portion of the court is covered in orange or red, the color indicating the player is successful in this position.
This is a wonderful demonstration of the power SportVU could put in an organization’s hand as they attempt to build the team. This is a relatively simple collaboration of statistics, but it provides a powerful suggestion that this crew should excel in exploiting the defensive weakness of the opposition, no matter who the opposition (and weakness) might be.
Put this kind of information in the hands of the GM during scouting season, provide matching data for the college ranks (where the technology is already working to grow), and you have the inspiration needed to change the business of building the roster.
One of the most enticing integrations of technologies for those working in sports may come from a focus towards one of the most damaging realities of the game: injury. For years, performance injuries have been considered a wild card. There has been an extremely shallow sense of knowledge about those events, not only in the moment they occur, but also in the activities leading to them and the effort to recover following.
The services provided by SportVU will provide a uniquely insightful sense of detail about the activities each player faces during ALL stages of performance. Teams will have the ability to investigate the events that occur before the injury, when the injury occurs, and after the injury… not only for the individual, but also for the team.
Consider a system allowing NBA teams (as discussed above) to identify health risks based not only on the player and his unique situation, but also around his role and the responsibilities associated with it, the particular moment in the game and his/her historical performance in those situations (both physically and statistically), or the progression of the player’s physical status DURING the game (as indicated by his performance). The opportunity to view physical changes in the player’s performance as they pertain to time, situation, momentum, personal health, and other factors we’ve never been able to access could become a true reality.
This could evolve not only the way players are evaluated, trained, utilized and progressed… but also the way TEAMS are built and formulated around that information. Integrate wearable biometric technologies, build the database of information to expand case studies for the individual as well as the team and the sport, improve the knowledge base around the intricate factors that influence the individual performance and the influence it has on the team… this is a truly potent recipe for evolution.
That journey begins with SportVU. This technology will provide exciting returns of immediate benefit today, but the potential progress it can provide for the future astounds.
In truth, SportVU may represent the most powerful tech innovation, for the world of sports, since the invention of the television.
We will see.