Joel Embiid is seven-feet tall, weighs 250 pounds and checks all the boxes for being a prototypical NBA center. Taken with the third overall pick in the 2014 draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, he overcame injuries early in his career and blossomed into a perennial All-Star who average 24.3 points and 11.4 rebounds per game last season.
But three short years before he signed an NBA contract and received life-changing money, he was a 17-year-old back home in Cameroon who was an aspiring … volleyball player?
True story: In 2011, the year he first picked up a basketball, Embiid received an unexpected invite to an NBA Basketball Without Borders camp hosted by Luc Mbah a Moute, one of a handful of NBA players who hail from Cameroon. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Embiid, who’s been nicknamed The Process, even returned to Africa last summer as an NBA ambassador.
“I feel like we have a lot of talent, undiscovered talent that can have a chance just like I did,” he told reporters in August. “They just need an opportunity.”
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At its Summer League in Las Vegas on Thursday, the NBA announced a strategic partnership that may forever alter the scouting landscape. The league now owns an equity stake in HomeCourt, the user-friendly shot-tracking app that will be able to unearth undiscovered talent in far-off markets such as China, India and Africa—or anywhere you might have a ball, hoop and smartphone.
“With HomeCourt, it no longer will be required for scouts to discover kids. Kids will be able to discover themselves,” says Andrew Yaffe, the NBA’s vice president of global strategy and innovation lead. “We’ll be rolling out features that will enable kids to measure their height, their wingspan, their basketball skills. And we’ll be able to evaluate and hopefully find the next generation of global superstars through submissions on this app, which we think is just incredibly exciting.”
The NBA is one of many investors participating in HomeCourt’s $8.5 million Series A funding round. Others include Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment, the parent company of the 76ers and New Jersey Devils; Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments, and Will Smith’s Dreamers Fund. A half-dozen current and former professional athletes also participated in the round, including the Brooklyn Nets’ Joe Harris and eight-time All-Star Steve Nash.
“It no longer will be required for scouts to discover kids,” Yaffe says. “Kids will be able to discover themselves.”
The NBA has three major goals with its HomeCourt partnership: to increase basketball fandom around the world, get more kids playing ball, and find the best talent in underserved markets. The league already hosts academies and camps globally to develop youth skills and keep tabs on rising stars. And by working closely with HomeCourt—the app that put an 11-year-old girl from Virginia on the Wall Street Journal’s radar for taking 100,000 shots in her driveway—the NBA hopes to vastly expand its ability to scope out talent around the world.
A number of NBA-themed shooting and dribbling challenges that appeared on HomeCourt this week are aimed at friendly competition among casual fans and serious players alike. Users can earn NBA-themed badges and appear on NBA leaderboards. “We’re trying to grow the next generation of fans and we know that kids who play basketball are more likely to become NBA fans,” says Amy Brooks, NBA’s chief innovation officer.
The league’s long-term vision expands far beyond the casual player, however. Ultimately, the NBA wants to build out what it refers to as “elite services” through the app, which would encompass scouting. Brooks said those elite services might lead to the advent of digital combines that uncover talent. Top players discovered through the app could potentially be invited to official NBA camps.
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“Today we host, in person, elite combines. Now we can do it digitally by testing wingspan, testing vertical leap, quickness and agility,” she said. “Especially for some of our priority markets where we’re trying to grow, we see so much potential because we can’t physically reach those people very easily. This app will allow us to sources those players.”
The trend of democratizing discovery process of players has started to sweep across sports. In soccer, for example, a company called Tonsser serves as a LinkedIn-like platform for youth players. The app enables soccer athletes to create digital profiles of their performance on the pitch where they can showcase their skills, connect with their peers, vote and receive votes on their performance from coaches and teammates.
Increasingly, top players on Tonsser are invited to exclusive pro-team trials. Over the past year, Tonsser has been expanding from a simple player network to a scouting ecosystem in which it works directly with pro teams in Europe. The goal has been to connect pro clubs via exclusive trials with top-ranked local talent, unearthed through a proprietary Tonsser ranking system.
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The NBA is taking a page from the Tonsser playbook but with slight modifications. Unlike European soccer clubs that can recruit talent for feeder academies at young ages, the NBA operates on a draft system. The 76ers, for example, can’t recruit a player directly through HomeCourt as soccer clubs in, say, the Premier League can through Tonsser. Rather, the league plans to use digital combines to highlight talent that might have otherwise been overlooked and recruit them to NBA camps. It can surface, say, the next LeBron James and help guide his development at a young age to put him on track for the draft.
The NBA said it’s taking scouting best practices from European soccer academies, such as FC Barcelona, and keeping an eye on scouting apps such as Tonsser to build a feeder system that best serves its needs. Unlike scouting apps with ranking systems that rely more on crowdsourced opinions from users, HomeCourt is powered exclusively by hard data. Metrics such as shooting consistency and ball handling can be proven on HomeCourt via video and measured by artificial intelligence.
As of Thursday, HomeCourt has collected user data from more than 10,000 cities across 170 countries.
“You can be in Egypt and say you’re taking a thousand shots a day. Now everybody can go in there and see that, see how consistent you are, and watch it too,” Harris says. “If you’re talented, this is a platform that allows you to be seen whereas you might not otherwise have been able to have this sort of access.”
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