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

explains it, back when he was a Phoenix Suns assistant coach in 1992, he had walked into a store to buy some music equipment. Inside the store, Barr noticed that the retailer also sold audio/video equipment, and his interest was piqued by a low-end, first-generation AVID nonlinear digital video editing machine. Tape cutting at the time was very laborious, and the state-of-the-art equipment was extremely large and impossible to bring on the road, so teams weren’t able to replicate the film work they did at their own facilities when they were on road trips. If anything was put together, it would come from the home office and be sent out via FedExor a similar carrier.
    Beyond a reduction in size and the ability to potentially travel with the new equipment, Barr also understood the advantages of being able to streamline the tape-cutting process, potentially allowing the Suns to splice tape during games for use in halftime meetings and in-game strategy adjustments. He asked the store owner if he thought the AVID editor could be built into a protective travel case. It could, and it was, and Barr suddenly had provided the Suns with a very significant advantage while starting to push pro basketball out of the deck-to-deck tape era (with AVID forming its own business called AVID Sports Pro to leverage the idea). Barr also says that the Suns at that time built the first comprehensive team-scouting database, which was phone-synced so everyone was able to see the same data and could review each other’s reports.
    These developments helped steer Barr away from a potential coaching career and toward a career creating technology designed to help coaches. In 1998, Barr partnered with another college basketball coach, Scott Mossman, to create Quantified Scouting Service, whichproduced computer-generated data reports based off of the company’s screening of game videos. This was still much too early for video streaming that could layer clips on top of numerical data being generated. Instead, Mossman and his wife used VCRs and a satellite dish to capture as many games as they could, and then farmed the tapes out to “loggers,” who tagged every play for their system. Barr’s clients then were able to use dial-up modems to access the reports.
    A few years later, with video streaming at a level where it was reasonable to create a platform that paired video with the plays the loggers were tagging, Barr partnered with engineer Nils Lahr and rechristened the company as Synergy Sports Technology. By 2008, they had a licensing agreement in place with the NBA to provide their data to the league’s television and digital arms. Today, Synergy is a market-dominating,cross-sport technology phenomenon.
    “The benefit of Synergy was that you were no longer tied to a local piece of equipment where you do all the work,” Barr said. “Instead, [now] it’s cloud-based and we do all the work. We do 80 percent of the tagging. You can still tag things and those can be associated and cross-pollinated with our data in custom reports. Now they can pull up any game that we’ve tagged. They can go through and tag all the play calls: fist, two out, fist down. It’s like baseball. Every team has a different set, so we can’t resolve that. We can’t figure out thirty different teams’ playbooks and the calls that they have. The plays tend to be the same, but they call it different things.
    “So if the team will take fifteen to twenty minutes and tag a team’s play calls, the result is staggering. They end up with a report that shows the breakdown of what happens each time they run those plays, what play types are run as a result [of the set]: pick and roll, post up, iso, whatever. You can see where your stars are getting points or not. You may be running something that you think is designed to help your star get off, to get him a touch when you really need it, but it might turn out that he doesn’t get that and you don’t even know that. You can see