Computers Are the New Basketball Coaches
Computers Are the New Basketball Coaches
‘Today’s players will not argue with a computer.’ The
latest shot-tracking technology in basketball is the latest sign of a profound
shift in the making of professional athletes.
By Ben Cohen Updated July 19, 2019 3:06 pm ET
Admiral Schofield was in the middle of the most important
workout of his life at the NBA draft combine a few months ago when he
introduced himself to a man in a polo shirt with a logo he recognized. It was
the least he could do. Schofield might not be a professional basketball player
if not for this person he’d never met.
“Thank you!” he told John Carter, the CEO of Noah
Basketball. “Thank you for everything.”
Since the summer after his freshman year at the
University of Tennessee, Schofield had been using Noah’s shot-tracking
technology, which attached cameras to the baskets to calculate the angle and
the ball’s position in the hoop. It would have been easy for Schofield to
ignore this kind of information. He’d already made it to the highest level of
college basketball without listening to a piece of technology named after a
biblical character.
But it turned out that Noah had something compelling to
say: It told Schofield that his shooting trajectory was too high. His shot’s
entry angle was 55 degrees when it should have been closer to 45 degrees. And
he trusted the data more than he trusted his own intuition.
What happened next would change Admiral Schofield’s life.
He spent months tinkering with his mechanics until he was no longer shooting
moonballs. As his shooting angle came down, his shooting percentage went up.
Schofield made 30% of his 3-pointers as a freshman and 41% over the next three
years.
That improvement would be worth millions of dollars when
he signed with the Washington Wizards last week and became one of the first
players to follow the advice of technology all the way to the NBA.
This is a profound shift in the making of the American professional
athlete. It used to be the great paradox of sports that employees in one of the
world’s most carefully quantified lines of work chose to reject the numbers
that governed their profession. But not anymore. Schofield belongs to a
generation of athletes that guzzles data.
“The most common quote I hear, whether it’s a
middle-school coach, high-school coach, college or NBA, is that today’s players
will not argue with a computer,” Carter said.
Carter says these athletes won’t respond to subjective coaching
now that more objective information is available to them. They prefer exact
numbers to estimates.
“That type of feedback is not accurate enough,” he said,
“and honestly players don’t trust it.”
The fantastic amount of granular information created
about every shot is not simply changing the way that players like Admiral
Schofield develop. It’s fundamentally changing the game.
This has already happened in other sports. There was a
similar confluence of events in baseball not long ago as players realized they
should optimize their swings to hit line drives and home runs while stadiums
were being equipped with tracking cameras that created valuable statistics and
proved how right they were. The effect was powerful enough to bring change to
Major League Baseball. More players took extreme measures to adjust the launch
angles of their swings all so they could hit a few more homers.
The NBA equivalent of the home run is the 3-pointer. It’s
no longer a mathematical secret that threes are worth more than twos, but now
players are coming into the league having studied geometry in addition to
arithmetic. They have shots that have been fine tuned by technology.
“If you can get young players engaged, it just becomes
part of their habits,” said San Antonio Spurs general manager R.C. Buford, “as
opposed to trying to change their habits mid-career.”
There is now such a premium on shooting that it’s spawned
a technological arms race. The ancient shooting gurus have been replaced by
products with names like HomeCourt, RSPCT and Noah in the gleaming practice
facilities of NBA teams, because they keep a comprehensive record of everything
you could want to know about any shot, in addition to all the things you didn’t
know it was possible to know.
The NBA even uses Noah at the draft combine after a
former college player named Rachel Marty Pyke, a daughter of Noah’s founder,
trained a machine-learning algorithm to search for patterns in more than 20
million shots. Her research helps teams make reliable predictions from limited
samples. If someone like Schofield only takes 50 shots at the combine, for
example, a three-dimensional profile of those shots reveals more about his
ability than his percentage.
It was during Noah’s demonstration with the Brooklyn Nets
a few years ago that Carter discovered a solid 3-point shooter hiding in plain
sight. The data suggested this player had a consistent shot and should be
taking more 3-pointers. But the reality clashed with that data. This player
wasn’t taking any 3-pointers at the time. As it happened, Carter was prescient:
Brook Lopez has suddenly become that solid 3-point shooter.
When she’s not studying basketball shooting, Pyke is busy
crunching another kind of data. She’s a cancer researcher. But you don’t have
to be attempting to cure disease to appreciate the latest advances in
shot-tracking technology.
Nets guard Joe Harris, who led the NBA in 3-point
shooting percentage last season, has always taken advantage of the most
sophisticated technology available to him. But for most of his life, it wasn’t
very sophisticated. It was barely even technology. He kept track of his makes
and misses by counting to himself or writing them down in pen and paper.
That changed when he got to college at the University of
Virginia and had access to Noah, and it changed again this year when he learned
about HomeCourt, a popular mobile app that lets him watch a highly technical,
real-time analysis of his shooting workout.
He liked it so much that he invested in the company. The
startup behind HomeCourt announced a round of funding last week that included a
deal with the NBA and backing from Bradley Beal, J.J. Redick, Sue Bird and more
of the world’s best shooters.
“I would’ve used this every day,” Harris said.
There are some players who actually will. Schofield
believes he would be in the NBA even if he hadn’t stumbled into shot-tracking
technology. “Because of my other intangibles,” he said. But he’s also living
proof that the most important parts of basketball are precisely the opposite.
They have never been so tangible.
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