Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion by Andy Glockner Read Free Book Online

second of your opponent’s game and you can get very complete scouting, or every single second of a particular player that you’re trying to scout.
    “It’s not that you go back and watch the last three, five games and have a video staff chop it up. You can basically get information about every single moment of the game. Every single pick that led to a post up, that led to a layup. The things that happened—maybe a pick and roll that was stopped, that’s something that you might want information about. Or a pick and roll that was defended well [and] that might’ve led to something else, that led to an iso, that led to a score, and somebody might report, ‘Well, there was an iso,’ but you don’t talk about all the other things that we stuffed.”
    So far, Maheswaran’s bet on his and his colleagues’ technological chops—specifically the discipline of spatiotemporal pattern recognition, which he oversimplifies as the science of “moving dots”—is paying significant dividends. With around 30 percent of the NBA as clients, Second Spectrum started adapting its technology for other sports, including professional football and soccer. The group also found a new home quickly after the aforementioned visit, shedding the U- shaped office for much bigger space near City Hall, a couple of miles northeast of Staples Center.
    While the technology is complicated, Maheswaran and his team have simplified the output to make for an elegant end-user experience. The use of language that basketball people actually use provides staffs with subject comfort as they seek out information that they think will help them make decisions. Knowing that coaches andtheir staffs often are less receptive when data is pushed onto them, Second Spectrum’s technology promotes the pulling of only the data that they’re interested in.
    “We have not tried to necessarily generate a whole new class of things,” Maheswaran said. “We go to the coaches and say, ‘What is it that you would want to know that you cannot know right now? Or what is it that you want to do that you cannot do right now?’ And we use the fact that a computer understands to get that to them. We don’t come up and say, ‘We’ve got seven new magic metrics that tell you what you should do,’ because coaches really, I think, if given the information, know their teams well, know their constraints well, and will figure out what the right thing is to do.
    “The question is: Do you have all the information you need, when you’re making your decision? And one of our things is the most informed make the best decisions, and there is a bottleneck in terms of how well informed you can be based on the technology and the manpower you have. And what we do is just give you basically one hundred times the power of having way more information, or one thousand times the power. I’m not sure quite how to measure this. The other thing we can do is because we have a computer that understands the data, we’ve also done some algorithms that allow the computers to understand the video.
    “So here, now, coaches have the initiative to look at numbers,” he added, “[and since] we’ve used the power of the fact that the computer understands both the video and the data, you could essentially ask a question and get the answer both in numbers and in video, instantaneously. So that is a very, very powerful thing.”

    Second Spectrum (and similarly oriented analysis businesses, such as MOCAP, a Silicon Valley company that works with the Golden State Warriors) is a next-generation development of the NBA’s original data and video compilation technology provider, Synergy SportsTechnology. That company was founded by former college and NBA assistant coach Garrick Barr back in 2005, and the origins of his service, which continues to thrive and is used by all thirty NBA teams and virtually every Division I men’s and women’s basketball program, come from very serendipitous roots.
    As Barr