Tracking athletes to generate actionable data and then translating that data into digestible visualizations for coaches and players has become one of the most important technological developments to ever impact sports.
Player tracking has made its largest impact in the NBA where the league has made it a point to track every single player and ball movement for every game with every team in all 29 NBA arenas.
One innovative company, Second Spectrum, leverages unique technological capabilities to transform data into highly accurate and usable analytics for teams, and interactive experiences for all sports fans.The company, based in Los Angeles, Calif., actually delivered its technology to several of this year’s NBA playoff teams. Second Spectrum CEO Rajiv Maheswaran explains in a new TED talk how “the science of moving dots” helps provide deeper insights into the game of basketball.
As Rajiv explains, “Our work is based on the premise that data will transform sports by enabling personalization, interaction and new forms of storytelling powered by machine understanding of sports.”
These “new forms of storytelling” from a basketball perspective can have a huge impact on the multi-million dollar contracts that NBA players sign because software like Second Spectrum’s can provide teams with mountains of previously unattainable data to use to analyze players and compare them with other players around the league.
But not only is simplifying basketball to “spatiotemporal pattern recognition” (as Rajiv puts it) a transformative change for the sport, it also has huge potential for all real-life situations where movement occurs. As Rajiv explains below, “I believe that with the development of the science of moving dots, we will move better. We will move smarter. We will move forward.”