The Professional Basketball Combine, a secondary showcase for players preparing for the NBA Draft, enters its third year with a new location and a new focus. The PBC is moving from the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., to the Mamba Sports Academy in suburban Los Angeles, and is emphasizing technology based testing to find new predictors of pro performance.
“We started talking about some advanced concepts and some new ideologies of what we could do to enhance the system in the talent evaluation world and really figure out how do we really help create differentiators between players who attend our event and help them succeed at the next level,” said Jake Kelfer, PBC founder and combine director. “And how do we provide teams an opportunity to see things that maybe they aren’t seeing before or in a different way?”
This year’s PBC will include evaluations conducted using Kinexon wearables, RSPCT’s shot tracker, and VERT’s jump assessment. Kevin King, who worked at Spalding and co-founded InfoMotion Sports, joined the PBC as its director of advanced combine testing. King is overseeing the implementation of these technologies at the May 21-22 combine and the development of some new predictive metrics in the areas of vertical explosion, defensive tenacity, catch-and-shoot three pointers, and offensive DNA.
The NBA Draft Combine is a league-run, invite-only event taking place next week in Chicago. The combine will highlight about 65 top prospects, and will be preceded by the inaugural G League Elite Camp, which will include about 40 more draft-eligible college players. The Pro Basketball Combine is independent of the NBA but was attended by scouts from more than 20 franchises last season, Kelfer said, with 24 players registered this month.
Of the 48 prospects to attend PBC events in its first two years, Kelfer said 47 went on to play professional basketball either in North America or overseas while the other one returned to school. Nine players signed two-way contracts for the G League, with eligibility of up to 45 days on an NBA roster. Nearly half the player pool, 23, received invites to the NBA Summer League.
Bulls guard Antonio Blakeney went on to become the 2017-18 G League Rookie of the Year before signing a full contract with the Chicago Bulls prior to this past season. He played 57 games and started three times.
Kinexon is an ultra-wideband device that has become the most-used wearable in the NBA. The technology already fully integrates with RSPCT, which uses Intel’s RealSense Depth Camera to create 3D trajectories of shots. VERT specializes in maximum vertical leap measurements, primarily with volleyball clients but also with the NBA’s Miami Heat. VERT’s biomechanists are working with King on a new hypothesis to gauge a player’s explosiveness.
“Understanding how high a person can jump is interesting, but over time, the absolute max vertical has not shown to be highly correlated to player success,” King said. “Jake and I hypothesized that what we should really be evaluating is vertical explosiveness.”
King’s InfoMotion Sports brought the sensor-integrated 94Fifty basketball to market—the first sporting goods product sold in an Apple store, he noted—and joined Saplding as its director of advanced concepts. (Spalding’s parent company acquired the intellectual property to the 94Fifty ball.) Though the ball sensor likely won’t be included at this year’s PBC, King noted, he is hopeful for its use in the future.
The PBC wants to insert players into common NBA scenarios. Major trends that will be assessed at the combine are the quickness and accuracy of catch-and-shoot three pointers and the ability to execute pick and rolls. The latter applies even to non-traditional formats, King said, noting the Nuggets’ role reversal. Center Nikola Jokic handles the ball while point guard Jamal Murray sets the screen.
King also observed how “position-less basketball” is evolving with players asked to fill a wider variety of roles on both sides of the ball. How players defend against those quick-catch shooters and how they move laterally to stop the ball will be closely tracked via Kinexon. King said the tracking system can identify the segmentation of each movement, quantifying changes in direction, top speed, acceleration, and deceleration.