“That gave us a big advantage. the Society of American Baseball Research, balls that are hit higher are more likely to turn into hits, The Bank Tech Checklist for M&A, Part 3: Optimizing Operations, MoneyFest 2020: Two Tech-Driven Forces Are Changing Financial Services Forever, Financial Services Firms Face Increasingly High Rate of Cyberattacks. “Analytics have become front and center with precisely when players are rested, how many minutes they get, who they’re matched up against,” said Silver. Sign up for the weekly Knowledge@Wharton e-mail newsletter, offering business leaders cutting-edge research and ideas from Wharton faculty and other experts. What if you put on the TV to watch Game One of the NBA Finals Thursday night, or even bought tickets to the game, and discovered that LeBron James or Stephen Curry wasn’t there? For the nerdy coaches—a term I use with love, given my degree in applied mathematics and my former life as a data analyst—this could be a major difference-maker. Examples he gave were banning Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life from the NBA for racist comments in 2014; publicly supporting Jason Collins, the first openly gay athlete in major American sports; and pulling the 2017 All-Star game out of Charlotte, North Carolina, because of HB2, the “Bathroom Bill” mandating that people could only use restrooms corresponding with the gender on their birth certificate. Even video game designers at EA Sports have used Synergy’s data and video. At that point, we might see iPads on college basketball benches just like we see Microsoft Surface Pros on the NFL sidelines all the time. When players and coaches are searching for data in Synergy, they can easily isolate individual possessions within a game and access video and data about certain types of plays, such as a pick-and-roll play or an isolation play. ASU women’s coach Charli Turner Thorne said all the information available on Synergy has turned her into “filmaholic.”, “The technology out right now is really helpful,” she said. To me, that's fair game. Teams then use this data to create a competitive advantage. Nebraska, LSU and most of the Big 12 schools already have ShotTracker set up in their men's practice facilities, and that data revolution is quickly spreading. Teams consider such technology to be proprietary and do not want anyone stealing their data or methods. But data analysis in sports is now taking teams far beyond old-school sabermetrics and game performance. I think it’s human nature to not give into that.”. One of the world’s foremost thinkers on business and social science, Daniel Pink is the author of several bestselling books on business, work, and behavior.Adam Silver has served as the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since February of 2014. According to the home page of its website, "ShotTracker is a sensor-based system that automatically captures statistical and performance analytics for an entire team in real-time." The only problem? The result is data-based video that teams or individual players can access on the Internet. Those sensors placed strategically in the ball, on the players and throughout the arena track the movement of the game and instantly relay it all to an app. The athletic department prints out box scores during media timeouts, and that's all you get. But if and when it does get implemented at a national level, it will be interesting to see how it affects the sport outside of the locker room. "It helps us get a feel for where our strengths and weaknesses are.". Another way the approach to resting has changed is that decisions are now based on high-tech analytics. But as the years have gone by, he has come to rely on them more and more. But the tech company has aspirations of being in every Division I arena within the next 18-24 months. Luhnow made a similar argument in a recent interview with MLB.com. That whole workflow is pretty futuristic.”. The truth of the matter is, teams have used analytics throughout the history of basketball. For example, they have become central to scouting, although he believes there’s still a role for “the touch and feel, the scouts’ ability to size someone up.”, He contrasted hiring for the NBA with hiring for the average large firm: When a Fortune 500 company makes a hiring decision, the worst-case scenario is the individual needs to be terminated and the company hires someone else. He mentioned team owners of color in addition to Jordan: the Sacramento Kings’ Vivek Ranadivé, who is Indian, and the Atlanta Hawks’ part owner Grant Hill, who is African-American. Interviewing Silver was Daniel Pink, author of several books on work and behavior including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell Is Human. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. “But from there, it gets deep very fast these days.”. “That night, Granderson doubled twice to snap a 3-for-49 slump. Cronkite News is the news division of Arizona PBS. Last year the New York Times wrote that the three-pointer has gone from “gimmick to game-changer” and noted that accuracy has risen: “While the league’s two-point field-goal percentage has been more or less flat for decades … three-point shooting has gone from below 30% for the first seven years of the shot to above 35% in recent years.”. It all sounds like a too-good-to-be-true technology straight out of an episode of Black Mirror, but it's already here. For now, though, this was a one-time deal. Samantha Pell/ Cronkite News. “In the last two months, he’s hit 12 home runs with a .299 average and 1.037 on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) that ranks in the National League’s top-three.”. One of the analyses done was that many long range inefficient 2 point shots were being taken by players. There have always been box scores posted, which provide basic information like points, rebounds and assists. “I think they get irritated when the media starts talking about how analytics should get the credit somehow, and analytics are so important. Analytics is changing the game of basketball, ... Another way the approach to resting has changed is that decisions are now based on high-tech analytics. “In season, it is a lot harder to focus in on things because as a team there is so much more to worry about,” Justice said. The main goal for Synergy is to show the data in the most user-friendly way possible for coaches. And data-driven writers, analysts and commentators would have something better and more rapidly available than box scores, play-by-play logs and tempo-free statistics to both research and relay information. Hurley implemented wearable technology from Catapult Sports that measures and records the energy output of players during practice. This year alone, Synergy will record about 60,000 basketball games. What can data analytics tell a major league baseball team? "When you look at a box score, it gives you the result, but it doesn't necessarily give you the path to get there. In 2014-15, NBA teams, for the first time, were more likely to shoot a 3 than a mid-range jump shot. The data was pretty basic up until the 1990s. “It can keep you away from a Draymond Green (of the Golden State Warriors. Silver noted that the NBA has about $8 billion in revenue and employs approximately 50,000 people globally, “I think [commissioner is] more of a typical CEO job than people might see from the outside,” he said. Meanwhile, many[…]. “I think that analytics is just interpretation of statistics,” Barr said. A box score just doesn't show you the runs. The secrecy surrounding each team’s analytics operation makes data security a paramount concern. “Everyone now is using Synergy,” Barr said. Dean Oliver, one of the pioneers of the NBA's analytics movement, offers an insightful overview of how numbers have changed the game and where they might be going. Some of the underlying back-end technology is fairly banal — desktop computers and laptops running specialized software to conduct data analysis — but some of it is cutting-edge, and includes artificial intelligence. Suns guard Leandro Barbosa, who is in his 14th NBA season, said analytics software has taught him to “be smart” on the court. He described a recent business meeting with Magic Johnson, the three-time MVP award winner who in February was named the Los Angeles Lakers’ president for basketball operations. When asked last week at the annual convention for the Society of American Baseball Research if the Mets used neural networks and other machine learning technology, Joe Lefkowitz, the team’s senior coordinator for baseball systems, appeared caught off guard, according to SportTechie, and replied, “Umm … yes?”. Besides keeping up with the latest in technology trends, he is also an avid lover of the New York Yankees, poetry, photography, traveling and escaping humidity. It made me a better player, and I think it did it for the other players. Those sensors placed strategically in the ball, on the players and throughout the arena track the movement of the game and instantly relay it all to an app. “Analytics are part and parcel of virtually everything we do now,” answered Silver. “Games are hardly ever sold out anymore because there’s presumably some price at which someone is willing to sell a ticket, even if they were planning to go. They are circumspect in talking about their specific use of analytics; when asked, CIO Chris Hanz declined to comment, citing the technology as “a competitive differentiator” for the team. The only problem?