Towards the end of September, students from undergraduates to PhDs will fill up a room in New York City, log onto their computers, and spend 24 hours creating potential solutions to the NBA’s most pressing analytics problems in the league’s second annual NBA Hackathon.
The first hackathon in September 2016 was much smaller in scale. According to Jason Rosenfeld, director of basketball analytics for the NBA, teams of students competed for just eight-plus hours, then a few finalists presented their projects to a panel of basketball executives, media and academics. The winning team came up with a tool and web app to analyze the effects of “hero ball,” a team’s tendency in the playoffs to revolve around one star player, and consequently, that team’s performance across various metrics in the postseason versus the regular season.
The NBA also had 15 teams send analytics staff to last year’s event, giving the students an opportunity to showcase their tech and analytics skills. In fact, five participants in the 2016 hackathon now work for an NBA team or the league office.
“We as a league office overall are very, very data-driven, including on the basketball side,” Rosenfeld said. “We know we have a lot of fans out there who are also very data-driven, and what better way to engage with our fans and potentially learn some interesting things than by leveraging the power of this group of fans and getting a fresh look at a lot of these different problems.”
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This year as part of a two-day format, there will be a separate business analytics track. Contestants on that track will work to solve the NBA’s back-end problems rather than to develop solutions to better understand the game itself. Participants on the business analytics track will create solutions for marketing, ticket sales, sponsorships, and other league functions, and will face a different panel of judges chosen by the NBA’s business departments.
Rosenfeld sees the possibility of students’ projects being implemented right away, since the hackathon takes place a month prior to the beginning of the 2017-18 season.
“I really don’t see why not, and I think that’s the ultimate goal, whether it is of more service to the league as a whole or to our teams,” Rosenfeld stated. “So if they build an interesting tool that helps evaluate players better or specific lineups or styles of play…why can’t teams start using it or at least leverage the ideas that the team had to build that model to then build something of their own?”
In order to compete, teams or individual students from accredited colleges in the U.S. and Canada have to go through a rigorous application process. (Individual applicants will be formed into teams at the hackathon.) Students can apply for either one of the tracks, or both, and will be chosen for the track at organizers’ discretion. Students can apply here.
Those students that do get selected have a lot to work for — tickets to NBA All-Star 2018, lunch with Commissioner Adam Silver, and the invaluable opportunity to meet and impress NBA decision-makers.