NBA: Expansion Of Motion Cameras To Open Up Analytics Even More

Every move on this play in a 2012-13 game between the New Orleans Hornets and Washington Wizards, including the officials, will be tracked beginning this season now that the NBA is going to install the SportVU motion camera system in all 29 arenas. (Flickr.com photo/Keith Allison)

The NBA announced last week that it will install motion-tracking cameras in every arena this season, according to the Associated Press.

This will throw the door to advanced analytics of player performance wide open for coaches, executives and fans. The SportVU motion camera system was initially introduced in Orlando during the 2009 NBA Finals and the technology monitors every move a player makes on the court, including gauging fatigue, and it can also monitor the performance of the officials.

The NBA will be the first professional basketball league in the world to use SportVU to analyze player movement and it also becomes the first U.S.-based sports league to embrace the technology fully.

The system includes six cameras and integrated software that delivers the data and after its introduction in Orlando in 2009, 15 teams bought the system from STATS—a joint operation of The Associated Press and 21st Century Fox—for their home arenas.

The cameras are located along the arena’s catwalk high above the floor, three aimed at each half of the court, and are synched with algorithms that extract three-dimensional positioning data for all of the objects (read players, officials and the ball) and captures that data at a rate of 25 frames per second.

The pictures are time-stamped and processed by a computer, connecting the data to the play-by-play feed to create a report within 90 seconds of a play. That means almost instantly, coaches and statisticians have the information on their computer or tablet.

Because SportVU tracks every movement, every pass, every shot, every touch a player gets, it’s only logical to assume that more advanced analytics will be coming soon. Teams that have been using the system freely admit they aren’t using even 10 percent of the data the system provides, according to ESPN.com’s Zach McCann from a 2012 report.

Some of the statistical data seems trivial, yet interesting, such as learning that over 13 games that were tracked by SportVU in 2011-12, Luol Deng of the Chicago Bulls led the league in the amount of distance traveled per game. Deng averaged 2.72 miles per game in the 13 games that were tracked, slightly ahead of Rudy Gay, then of the Memphis Grizzlies, who logged 2.64 miles in the 12 games that were tracked.

The system can provide teams and stat geeks alike with information ranging from how well Ricky Rubio guarded Russell Westbrook in a given game to how many times Al Jefferson touched the ball on the left block in a given half to how close to 100 percent Derrick Rose is in his first few games back from the knee injury that cost him the entire 2012-13 season.

Grantland.com’s Zack Lowe discussed how the SportVU system is changing the NBA during this spring’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (warning, this is a fairly lengthy video):

The explosion of data that is going to come from this is staggering to consider. When the technology was only in 15 of the league’s 29 arenas (since the Los Angeles Clippers and Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center), the database was broad, but incomplete.

But beginning this season, that database will be complete and encompass the entire NBA. There may be metrics that we can’t even think of yet that will be available for analysis.

NBA fans always are reminded of Christmas morning when the season nears. For the stat geek crowd, SportVU will be a very, very special gift underneath the NBA’s tree.

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