Imagine for a minute… Three seconds left in the game and Clipper’s Forward, Blake Griffin recovers a defensive rebound and rushes in for a buzzer-beater. He launches the ball to the net and scores, gaining three points to win the game by one point! What if, a couple seconds later, you could see the exact distance Griffin was from the net and how fast he threw the ball? What if Griffin was unsuccessful with that buzzer-beater? Imagine how much more mad at Griffin you’d get when you could see that the probability of making that shot was only 5% when he had enough time to pass to Chris Paul who had a 70% season success rate of making a 40 foot three-pointer from exactly where he was standing. What if you could see exactly what Griffin and Paul saw in those last three seconds? Believe it or not, this technology is a lot closer than you think and it’s going to change the way you watch Basketball.
Three companies, SAP, STATS LLC, and Second Spectrum are on the forefront of this technology. The most recent advancement, introduced by the Clippers, comes from Second Spectrum.
“We have this product called DataFX that combines storytelling, video, advanced stats and special effects, all together to tell sort of the hidden side of what is going on in the game that you might not see,” says Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO of Second Spectrum, the company behind this new sports tech.
Read NPR’s Article “New Players In The NBA: Big Data, User-Controlled Jumbotrons.”