Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (5 page)

Second Spectrum (and similarly oriented analysis businesses, such as MOCAP, a Silicon Valley company that works with the Golden State Warriors) is a next-generation development of the NBA’s original data and video compilation technology provider, Synergy Sports
Technology. That company was founded by former college and NBA assistant coach Garrick Barr back in 2005, and the origins of his service, which continues to thrive and is used by all thirty NBA teams and virtually every Division I men’s and women’s basketball program, come from very serendipitous roots.

As Barr explains it, back when he was a Phoenix Suns assistant coach in 1992, he had walked into a store to buy some music equipment. Inside the store, Barr noticed that the retailer also sold audio/video equipment, and his interest was piqued by a low-end, first-generation AVID nonlinear digital video editing machine. Tape cutting at the time was very laborious, and the state-of-the-art equipment was extremely large and impossible to bring on the road, so teams weren’t able to replicate the film work they did at their own facilities when they were on road trips. If anything was put together, it would come from the home office and be sent out via FedEx
or a similar carrier.

Beyond a reduction in size and the ability to potentially travel with the new equipment, Barr also understood the advantages of being able to streamline the tape-cutting process, potentially allowing the Suns to splice tape during games for use in halftime meetings and in-game strategy adjustments. He asked the store owner if he thought the AVID editor could be built into a protective travel case. It could, and it was, and Barr suddenly had provided the Suns with a very significant advantage while starting to push pro basketball out of the deck-to-deck tape era (with AVID forming its own business called AVID Sports Pro to leverage the idea). Barr also says that the Suns at that time built the first comprehensive team-scouting database, which was phone-synced so everyone was able to see the same data and could review each other’s reports.

These developments helped steer Barr away from a potential coaching career and toward a career creating technology designed to help coaches. In 1998, Barr partnered with another college basketball coach, Scott Mossman, to create Quantified Scouting Service, which
produced computer-generated data reports based off of the company’s screening of game videos. This was still much too early for video streaming that could layer clips on top of numerical data being generated. Instead, Mossman and his wife used VCRs and a satellite dish to capture as many games as they could, and then farmed the tapes out to “loggers,” who tagged every play for their system. Barr’s clients then were able to use dial-up modems to access the reports.

A few years later, with video streaming at a level where it was reasonable to create a platform that paired video with the plays the loggers were tagging, Barr partnered with engineer Nils Lahr and rechristened the company as Synergy Sports Technology. By 2008, they had a licensing agreement in place with the NBA to provide their data to the league’s television and digital arms. Today, Synergy is a market-dominating,
cross-sport technology phenomenon.

“The benefit of Synergy was that you were no longer tied to a local piece of equipment where you do all the work,” Barr said. “Instead, [now] it’s cloud-based and we do all the work. We do 80 percent of the tagging. You can still tag things and those can be associated and cross-pollinated with our data in custom reports. Now they can pull up any game that we’ve tagged. They can go through and tag all the play calls: fist, two out, fist down. It’s like baseball. Every team has a different set, so we can’t resolve that. We can’t figure out thirty different teams’ playbooks and the calls that they have. The plays tend to be the same, but they call it different things.

“So if the team will take fifteen to twenty minutes and tag a team’s play calls, the result is staggering. They end up with a report that shows the breakdown of what happens each time they run those plays, what play types are run as a result [of the set]: pick and roll, post up, iso, whatever. You can see where your stars are getting points or not. You may be running something that you think is designed to help your star get off, to get him a touch when you really need it, but it might turn out that he doesn’t get that and you don’t even know that. You can see which plays result in offensive rebounds or threes.
You can see the proportions on everything, the points per possession on everything.

“You’re essentially taking three data sets and combining them to produce that report. There’s the stuff that we logged, the stuff that they logged, and the stuff the scorer’s table logged, so you got points, assists, and rebounds and all that stuff; you have shot locations—in college, based upon us tagging it; in the pros, they do it, so we just use their locations. And then you have all the play-type information we log, as well as the defensive side of the ball—who was guarding the play and what happened. Who the players are, what the play type was, where on the floor were they, what direction did they go, what was the move that was used. And then what was the ultimate result, and that’s all tied to the scorer’s table data—the stats feed—so we know who had the assist, whether it was a three or a two. We don’t have to tag all of that since it’s integrated data feeds.

“The result is you have a report that tells you what your team or the opposing team does, what proportion, how good they are, what they get out of it, how they set up, etc. And any way you want to, you can click on a matching data point and get the related video.”

Barr said he is aware of what companies like Second Spectrum are doing—in fact, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, an investor in Synergy, brought the two parties together for a bit for potential collaboration—and, really, Synergy is providing similar types of data, similar access to video clips, and similar ease of use/accessibility for the end user. Barr makes sure his loggers also use “coach-speak,” so coaches are comfortable with the terminology returned in the queries.

While neither CEO specified his exact price points, conversations with teams that utilize their products confirm that Synergy is more affordable than Second Spectrum’s solution, which certainly has some appeal. There also are differences in the outputs. Synergy’s output, while really robust and increasingly aided by data visualization, doesn’t have Second Spectrum’s same granularity, as plays on Synergy
are tagged according to the final action that leads to a shot, foul, or turnover, rather than breaking down the possession into multiple elements. Also, while you are able to pull up sequences of video like the Chris Paul example earlier, each clip is of the entire possession. If you want to carve out more specific time periods within a possession, you would need to go into Synergy’s nice video-editing capabilities to do that.

The quality of any output, though, is dictated by the quality of the data being used to generate it, and as such, the principal discussion in comparing the products of machine learning versus human loggers centers around the concept of “what is good enough?” While there are a few NBA teams that have brought most things in-house and hired a slew of programmers and data scientists to extract value from all of the different data being collected, most NBA teams don’t require—or want, for now—that level of rigorousness. A comprehensive outsourced solution with an acceptable standard of quality is a perfectly fine solution for them. They get much of the benefit without a lot of the operational headaches of hiring up and maintaining a database that still requires integration across other platforms to match the capabilities of top third-party providers.

Barr believes his loggers’ accuracy is more than good enough. He touts the company’s rigorous standards for quality assurance, where data tags go through a series of second checks and global spot-checking for accuracy, and also he knows that if his work wasn’t accurate enough, he would hear about it directly from the thousands of coaches he works with. That said, Barr also understands the benefits of better technology, so he’s interested in the ongoing tech-driven processes that are converting SportVU motion data into valuable output. (As of August 2015, Synergy had not yet incorporated SportVU into its overall product.)

“One of the first things Lars asked me [when they started this] was ‘Can this be automated?’ And that would be great. That’s the Holy Grail. I get it,” Barr said. “Ultimately, human beings are fallible,
and if you can perfect machine recognition, maybe you can eliminate the fallibility, although I think our error margin is completely acceptable by all coaches at this point, and pretty much all along.

“Like zone recognition: I will concede we were terrible at that for a while, but we made it a much bigger emphasis and we’re doing much better on it now. It’s still a tough one, but we’re doing it.

“With respect to the computer, the machine-type recognition, maybe it will give you better accuracy, and I suppose that’s inevitable given the way technology marches forward. I’ll concede that. And when that happens, I’ll be the first one standing in line and using that technology instead of the people, because of the second benefit: it’s cheaper.”

That’s not to say that Synergy is shying away from technological innovation. During our conversation, Barr noted that Synergy was on the brink of introducing a more integrated product where NBA teams will be able to operate their own databases behind Synergy’s firewall. That will allow the teams to seamlessly integrate their work with Synergy’s data, along with Synergy’s video editing and other capabilities, instead of the team having to implement that kind of integration on their end. As part of that push, Synergy will start enabling SportVU data intake within their own products. Barr believes a total turnkey solution on that level will be really appealing to almost every one of Synergy’s existing customers.

“A lot of NBA teams don’t want to build a database and hire programmers and do all of that themselves,” he said. “It’s very expensive and, ultimately, is inefficient. If you spend enough money on it, you get what Daryl [Morey in Houston] has. You get what Boston has. You get what Dallas has. There are some teams that are doing extraordinary things there. But I will bet that over 90 percent of the teams will end up operating their database, with their own proprietary tagging and services they buy into and import data, they’re all going to do it within Synergy within the next five years. Probably quicker than that once we have it, because the price point is going to
be so much sweeter. You don’t need programmers to query the data. We allow methods where you can use an expression editor in order to create the queries without having any particular expertise. I think it’s going to be a game-changer.

“We are not logging everything we could log [currently],” Barr added. “We’re going to identify several new things to make our data set more robust, but clearly there’s more stuff that can be identified. There is automated tracking like SportVU, which we are not currently working with in our system. So, yeah, if you have unlimited resources, and I think Daryl is the poster child for this, then you are going to be able to extract an nth degree of data, significant data and value into your applications and your ability ultimately to win games via the draft or scouting or trades or even your coach’s development. All of that stuff. But I do agree that in the vast majority of cases, teams find what we offer to be enough.”

While Synergy was nailing down an alliance with the NBA in 2008, that also was the year STATS, LLC, began investigating the merits of SportVU, a company that was repurposing Israeli missile-tracking technology for sporting applications. STATS ultimately decided to acquire SportVU, which had adapted a system originally created by military defense electronics manufacturer Elbit Technologies, and was, in 2008, using it to track the
movements of soccer players.

The technology, which was created to analyze the actual paths of launched missiles against their anticipated trajectories, evolved to where cameras were hung above playing services to track the movements of players and the ball in three dimensions, and record all of that data in real time. When Brian Kopp, now the North American president of Catapult Sports, an Australia-based maker of wearable sports technology, arrived at STATS that year to work as a strategist, he was handed the task of figuring out how to translate this new soccer technology for other sports.

“So we looked at American football, [and worked with] the NFL for a while, and early on a couple of basketball teams [came down]—Houston and the guys at San Antonio and a couple others,” Kopp said. “They reached out to me and took my calls because they were scouring what was going on in other sports, and they saw these camera technologies used in soccer, and they allowed me to put some cameras in the arena and start to go about building this technology.

“What’s interesting about it is the technology didn’t exist for basketball. We had to build it, but it’s not like we had a basketball arena. So we had to go to the teams and say, ‘Can I please put some cameras in, so that I can build this thing?’ So when I first started [landing teams as clients], they didn’t have anything [in place to use it]. It was just an idea. Their edge was to be the first ones to understand it, to be the first ones to get access to it, and then hopefully drive it forward . . . they knew that eventually the power would be getting it in every arena, but they were hoping that [they’d] have a first-mover advantage, and so we worked with a couple of teams.