NBA general managers, head coaches and training staffs soon will have more player movement data available to them than ever before.
STATS Inc. and Catapult Sports have agreed to a partnership that will integrate SportVU 3D-tracking data from games and Catapult GPS-tracking data from practices into one package for NBA teams.
How will they use this information? What will be its impact on how the NBA and its teams approach player development, injuries and the sport as a whole? Let's take a look.
A brief history of player tracking
SportVU player tracking data began filling the gaps left in the box score when it came onto the NBA scene starting in 2009-10, with only a few clubs signing up to put state-of-the-art cameras in their arena rafters. Only a small percentage of games were captured, leaving data analysts to pick at scraps. But beginning with this season, all 30 teams have access to advanced player data thanks to a partnership with the league office. Part of that deal with the NBA meant that we get fancy stats on NBA.com, but it also meant that teams get a complete data set on all 82 games.
But there was always a missing piece to the puzzle. Teams knew how far their players ran in games and generally how much work they put in on game night. As they found, minutes played doesn't tell the whole story. For example, SportVU cameras found that Chandler Parsons ran 30 more miles than James Harden in virtually the same number of minutes this season.
But what about insights into practice? How much work do they put in then?
SportVU cameras are no help here. They're set up in every arena, but not in practice courts. As a result, teams have had to look elsewhere to track how much work players were putting in during practice and how it translated to health and performance in games. That's where Catapult Sports comes in. With their wearable GPS tracking and "accelerometer" devices, teams are given a whole new data set to munch on.
A total of 12 teams are now on board with Catapult Sports and that number is expected to grow as a result of this new partnership and the publicity that comes with Mark Cuban becoming an investor.
One issue with Catapult: Because of league rules, it can't capture data in games. Players can't wear electronic devices once the ball is tipped. Yet.
Team executives are hopeful NBA commissioner Adam Silver will lift the ban on GPS tracking devices in games, as the D-League already has this past season. However, there's no indication that a rule change will be in place by next season.
Big data, big questions
As the mountains of data have piled up over the years, NBA teams have been clamoring for simplicity. Often times, trainers and executives will have several programs open just to look at their player workloads in a given week. The SportVU and Catapult partnership will help simplify the dashboard so teams can get a snapshot of each player's metrics on one page. All 30 teams have the STATS Inc software called ICE, so the Catapult data will be integrated smoothly in the same interface. It's a cheat sheet of sorts.
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At the end of the day the league office and teams have a common goal: to protect its players. And if you can measure it, you can manage it.
"-- Gary McCoy, Catapult senior applied sports scientist
SportVU's visibility was important for Catapult to enter the NBA marketplace. Teams were already familiar with ICE and now they'll have an opportunity to see practice and game data all on one screen. Gary McCoy, Catapult's senior applied sports scientist, said the new interface as the equivalent of a Formula 1 race car dashboard -- only now it will have more metrics than it did before.
"At the end of the day," McCoy said, "the league office and teams have a common goal: to protect its players. And if you can measure it, you can manage it."
Coaches make tough decisions all the time, but now they'll have more information to help guide them. When do I bench player? How should I divvy up his minutes across the season? Does he need more or less work in practice? When is he ready to return to the court after rehab?
SportVU and Catapult can help answer those questions and open up new fascinating questions thanks to the marriage of data sets. If a player works extra hard in practice, does fourth-quarter fatigue set in quicker? How taxing is it to run 100 pick-and-rolls in a game (which SportVU can track) and then do shooting drills the very next day? Are floor sprints in practice a waste of time when 80 percent of in-game movement is in the lateral or backward directions?
The drawbacks
A caveat: SportVU and Catapult data is not an apples-to-apples comparison. This raises some level of uncertainty. The GPS tracking devices are far more precise than the SportVU cameras because the devices are actually worn on the body. SportVU attempts to calculate the distance and workload based on tracking algorithms derived from lenses high up in the rafters, so it's not nearly as rigorous as the Catapult technology, which is housed right on the player.
Furthermore, SportVU cameras can't detect when a player leaves the ground to jump in the air, which is a large source of player fatigue. SportVU cameras can estimate the distance a player traveled to get a rebound on the horizontal plane, but it can't distinguish whether he jumped six times to grab the ball or didn't leave the ground at all. Ask any player: Playing volleyball at the rim is hard work. To that end, SportVU estimations about in-game workload leave out a big chunk of the picture. Catapult devices can pick it up, but SportVU cannot.
For this reason, teams won't be able to say exactly how much energy a player has burned in a week's time or how much strain he has placed on his body. Not until the league loosens restrictions on the in-game wearable technology. But that's a small gripe in the big picture.
Also, Catapult isn't the only game in town. Several teams, such as the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers, employ a workload monitoring technology similar to Catapult's devices called Zephyr. Whereas Zephyr sells products for both hospitals and the playing field, Catapult is geared specifically and only to athletes. And rest assured, there will be more players in the market.
Indeed, devices that feed injury prevention analytics are popping up all around sports and it's taking the guesswork out of recovery and rehab. The hope is that the collaboration between the two giants of SportVU and Catapult will make it easier for teams to minimize player injury and ultimately keep their stars on the floor.