The revolution in basketball analytics
From the Grantland blog at ESPN
New technology and statistics will change the way we understand basketball, even if they also create friction between coaches and front-office personnel trying to integrate new concepts into on-court play. The most important innovation in the NBA in recent years is a camera-tracking system, known as SportVU, that records every movement on the floor and spits it back at its front-office keepers as a byzantine series of geometric coordinates. Fifteen NBA teams have purchased the cameras, which cost about $100,000 per year, from STATS LLC; turning those X-Y coordinates into useful data is the main challenge those teams face.
Some teams are just starting with the cameras, while others that bought them right away are far ahead and asking very interesting questions. Those 15 teams have been very secretive in revealing how they’ve used the data, but one team that has made serious progress — the Toronto Raptors — opened up the black box in a series of meetings this month with Grantland.
The Raptors do have a current record of 26-41, so there seem to be limits to what the analytics can achieve…
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
IIRC 3 or 4 years back Rugby League teams were using GPS to monitor players movements etc. I’m not sure if it was just practice or game play as well.
You can’t use GPS with basketball though because the satellites can’t see through the roof. And, I guess, filming it gives you both the home teams and the aways teams data. I doubt the opposition would hand over their GPS data to their competitors..
12 years ago
As I understand it, the Silver Ferns use video, but hand-coded rather than auto-coded. There’s a lot less money in netball.
12 years ago