Big tech a big help to B’klyn
The NBA has become more and more analytics-driven, and the Nets have gone all-in on technology as much as anybody.
Just watching one of their games drives that point home: players on the bench study their laptops, pass iPads from one to another and learn on the fly, not just from plays on the court, but also from analysis off it.
“These things are here to help us. So if you use analytics the right way, it absolutely is helpful,” Blake Griffin said. “I think we do do that. There’s a lot of information out there, but you have to find what’s most useful to you, to your team, and utilize it like that. So I’m definitely a fan of analytics.”
With the Nets, Griffin is using it in ways he never has before, and for a player who has been in the NBA for more than a decade, that’s saying something. There’s a saying in the league that proceeds him: KYP, or Know Your Personnel. The Nets are using STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to help their players do just that.
Griffin spoke virtually to about 1,000 students across the city at the recent NETSTEM Day, explaining to kids who are being taught about STEM through basketball-themed computer games how the professionals make use of similar technology.
Basketball is a game of angles, and the Nets use analytics to help players hone their use of them in getting to the basket on offense and cutting off drives on defense. But the work extends to real time, while games are going on. The Nets can get help self-correcting a bad shot or a botched play, thanks to interactive software.
“It can be anything from a play that we might’ve messed up or a play we just ran that we feel we can get something else on it,” Griffin said.
“It’s great. What’s really cool is [coach Steve] Nash uses an iPad to draw up our plays. He has this software where each player has a little thing and you can move the ball around. Then once he does, he can hit play and then it’ll actually do it for him, so you can watch it on the screen. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. I thought it was pretty cool that all this technology is being used more in games in real time.”