NBA’S fresh deal with Stats to track players every game

The National Basketball Association announced a contract with sports information company Stats last week to install player-tracking camera systems in every arena beginning next season.

The Stats technology, called SportVU, uses six cameras to capture the positions of every player and the ball 25 times per second. Fifteen teams, half of the league, already had the cameras as of last season. Now, instead of team-by-team contracts, Stats has a multiyear deal with the NBA for an undisclosed sum.

Player tracking and motion capture are at the vanguard of the now ubiquitous use of data analytics in sports. With SportVU, the NBA becomes the first major U.S. league to invest in a uniform system.

“It’s enormously important because of its accuracy and the depth of the detail of the information,” says Steve Hellmuth, the NBA’s vice president in charge of operations and technology. “It’s an essential tool for getting a deeper understanding of the sport.”

All 30 NBA teams will get complete SportVU data from every game. Stats will provide the raw X-Y coordinate logs as well as reports that integrate the data with play-by-play information.

“While the data itself can be very complicated, there is a lot of power in it,” says Stats Vice President Brian Kopp. “The output could be as simple as looking at a report at halftime to see how many times a player touched (the ball) in a certain area.”

Teams will do most of that number-crunching themselves and guard their findings closely. The league, however, is open to sharing the data more widely. “I’m expecting shortly to get a request from some MIT students who are interested in doing some analytics,” Hellmuth says. “In that case it’s a mutual decision between Stats and the NBA to release the data.” While publishing such a large trove online is difficult, the ultimate goal, Hellmuth says, is transparency.