After every game, NBA coaches and players pore over stat sheets that tabulate points, rebounds, assists, and increasingly more breakouts. But beyond these quick reads, the league’s real number crunchers are constantly analyzing mountains of data in team front offices. “Chasing Perfection” examines in great depth how teams are heavily investing both time and money to use computer technology to evaluate players in the digital age. The race is to not only assess the superstars, but to identify those players with hidden potential needed to create a championship team.
Here’s an excerpt from Chasing Perfection:
“Information-gathering and -sharing structures for NBA teams differ wildly, but at a baseline, the operations are very complicated and nuanced. The possible data pieces a team can gather include game data from SportVU, in-game proprietary data being tracked by staffers, in-game/trend data from Synergy, practice data coming from Catapult or other wearable technology devices, practice data being tracked by staffers (the 76ers, notably, track every shot, including free throws, taken in practices), medical data, sleep data, salary and cap data, college and international scouting data, NBA pro personnel data, and advance scouting data.
“All of that different data can be parsed in an enormous number of ways, and there are different constituents for each kind of data, all of whom consume and subsequently communicate findings to other constituents in very different ways.”
