The business of Big data: How to change the NBA?

"I welcome those tools that work, especially since we are living in an era of informatization," he said. "Bosh to the" big data "to make this comment, his heat is looking forward to consecutive dream.

Despite the successful revenge of the Spurs who missed the championship in last season's short, the eventual return of LeBron to the knight and then to change the situation in the East and west affected the entire league. But, just as the City team has grown old in the league with new life in general, over the years, with the "Big Data" in the Alliance operations and the development of the team played an increasingly prominent role, we also began to pay more and more attention to this technology and philosophy.

Not only in the rhetoric of internet companies such as Google and Amazon, but in Silicon Valley and colleges and universities, in the NBA, in the league's global outreach, the "Big data" figure is becoming more frequent and plays an increasingly important role.

Digital Games

In history, perhaps never a book like "Penalty Gold" (Moneyball) has such a big impact on the sports industry. After the book, people began to pay attention to the numbers in sports competitions.

An NBA game consists of four sections, with a regular time of 48 minutes. An NBA team has 82 regular games a season, the main away 41, and then the top 8 of the east and west into the playoffs, in the 7 game, after at least 3 rounds of 12 round to the final. The NBA now has 30 teams, a full season of about 5 months, with more than 1200 games in total.

These numbers define part of the NBA and more data make the NBA an increasingly popular sport. In a way, it's essentially a number, and very few races have the same complex and complex data as it is-not just the fans, the media, the scores, the assists, the rebounds, the hit rates, and the efficiency Rating, who the columnists relish, Player efficiency, which translates the performance of the players on the field into synthetic values, has now become one of the key indicators of the player's level, and (win share the index by considering the team's wins and the player's performance), Reflects a player's contribution to the team's success, that is, his importance to the team, etc.

For the team's coaches, in addition to the performance of the field, they need to use the data to understand the characteristics of the players, help them improve their weaknesses to play an advantage, and then set the game, and according to the team's staff changes to promote team style changes to maintain long-term competitiveness. Such cases are not uncommon in the NBA.

Phil, who used the "Triangle attack" of the bull and the Lakers system and was a great success, fully liberated Divac and Webber under the "Princeton System" The Great glory of the King team, using the combination of Nash and Stoudemire to set off the 7-second fast attack of the solar team, of course, There is also the Spurs that have experienced the transition from inside-out to pick&pop tactics in the light of the core age of GDP growth and new membership.

The ability of the player and the team's cooperation translates into the data on the pitch, which is an important basis for the adjustment of coaches and management teams on the pitch, and it can even be said that the data not only become the players, the team and the Alliance, but also the starting point.

"If better analysts can't create an advantage, who can?" Better data! ”

Morey is a great guide to the importance of data in the Harvard Business Review.

Perhaps there is no team manager in the league that is more superstitious than the Rockets ' Morey-although the team's performance has never been broken, his mania and obsession are a big issue for both the league and the fans-but there is no denying that his data theory is being adopted by more and more teams and even alliances.

The fact that the NBA has become a commercially successful sporting event with ESPN and TNT's recently signed 9-year worth of 24 billion-dollar relay contracts has been playing an increasingly important role.

Money Ball

Beijing Time November 5, 2014, the Lakers and the Sun game, 36-Year-old Kobe Bryant played 44 minutes, 37 to 14 scored 39 points 9 rebounds 1 assists. For the past 30 years, it has been the 2nd player in the league who has shot more than 35 times in a single game.

So, who was the first? Past fans and journalists may have to search through Google, perhaps in a Third-party professional web site such as ESPN, BR and 82games--not a convenient and easy process.

This is why the alliance used the Hana platform in collaboration with SAP in 2012, thanks to the platform's real-time memory and rapid analysis capabilities, NBA.com provides users with real-time update information and analysis tools for teams, players, games, and NBA.com. Since the 1947~47 season, all of the NBA's total of more than 4500 trillion data segments can be in the NBA official online in an intuitive, easy way to retrieve.

On the nba.com/stats, we can easily get the answer to this question: Jordan, in 2001 against the Hornets in the game, he shot 38 times, to get 51 points. With technical support from the Hana platform, The nba.com can support thousands of simultaneous searches and tens of thousands of concurrent real-time data search requests, all of which are uploaded and refreshed within 5 minutes of the end of the game, and these improvements and enhancements are attractive to more than 450 million of the NBA's fans worldwide.

Statistics show that after the use of the Hana platform, Nba.com/stats browsing volume of more than 27 billion, access to users compared to the previous increase of 66%, the average stay time also increased by nearly 60%. In addition to organizing tournament history and real-time information and enhancing the user experience, this is one of the original intentions of Alliance and SAP collaboration--driving the nba.com of user traffic. As Michael Gliedman, the NBA CIO, puts it: The SAP Hana Platform makes the alliance create a sports website that I think is the best that I have ever experienced.

Outside the NBA, the San Francisco 49 people of the NFL (national NCAA League, the American Rugby league), the New York Yankees and the Hoffenheim club of the Bundesliga have also used the Hana platform to deal with big data, whether it's basketball, football or rugby, and everyone has learned that In the new era, the application of large data is becoming an essential and important link.

Enhance the user experience, not only in the Alliance community Care activities, to the attention of ethnic minority festivals, in the new era, through the way of large data, so that fans accept and recognize NBA.com, so that the official website is not only a news site, but a can make both fans and even analysts can use their resources.

In addition to the alliance, teams are also actively promoting the application of large data. Now, NBA30 teams are using the SPORTVU technology developed by Stats, which uses 6 cameras to track players on the field, record 25 actions per second, and collect 72,000 data points a game.

by outputting and collating raw data, teams and players can gain some of the facts that are overlooked in general statistics--sportvu the passing of a player but not the receiver is considered a successful assist. The comprehensive three-dimensional data collection analysis can reflect the performance and practical ability of the players on the field, perhaps, the one who cut 83 points with his teammates is the most sympathetic.

The wide application of large data in the alliance is not only on the pitch but also on the team's architecture and the introduction of the player's renewal.

In the Lakers ' 4th game against the Warriors in the 14~15 season, Klay Thompson, who has renewed the 4-year total of 70 million-dollar top-salary contracts, scored the highest 41 points, second only to Griffin on the scoring list, before the 4-year contract he paid only 10.1 million dollars.

Chandler-Parsons, who had been signed by the Mavericks for 3 years and 46 million dollars, Chandler Parsons in the first three games of the season with 15.3 points at the top, scoring at 3rd points in the Rockets ' first season in 2011. Because of the application and analysis of large data, let the team managers and coaches discover their potential and value, making it possible for young people who have been active in the past few years to get a top-paid contract, to prove themselves to teammates, teams and spectators, and to help the team win.

With the intervention of large data technology including SAP HANA Platform, SportVU and so on, the future NBA will become more and more exciting--the development of sports has never shown such a truth, technology is to make athletes and sports themselves toward "Faster,higher,stronger" The goal of (faster, higher, stronger) is the greatest motivation to keep moving forward.

"We're doing the money ball, but we're doing what no one else has done before, and we call it the ' Money Ball upgrade ' (Moneyball Plus). ”

Brian Kopp, former vice president of Stats, said.

The business of Big data

"Sports will eventually be used for business," he said. Jonathan Becher, the SAP company CMO, in 2013 looked forward to the significance of the two sides ' cooperation to the NBA.

The analysis of the data, and the resulting significant results, was already being validated in the MLB (Major League Baseball, Major League of America) with the NBA's four major professional leagues.

As analyzed in the bestseller "Penalty Gold" (Moneyball), through a large number of quantitative analysis based on data, abandoned the previous "strike rate" in turn to the "barrier rate" as the most important measure of the player, using the value of the hit rate to find those who are ignored by other teams baseball players, The Green Hat team from the town of Oakland became one of the most focused and input-output teams in the baseball League.

In this era of information and Internet development more and more rapid, "Big data" in real life is being used more and more widely, its effect is more and more obvious, itself has become a broad potential and market prospects business.

The vast amount of data in the NBA is rich in monetization, such as the use of mobile apps to integrate the data, such as the licensing of third-party companies using the image of the alliance players such as 2K, NBA Live and other series of games, these tools can create a good profit for the alliance, And these benefits eventually feed into the broader and deeper application of big data in the alliance.

Not just "big data", all the ongoing or upcoming efforts are made to make the NBA's 21st century sport more exciting and commercially more successful. Only in this way, it is possible to achieve the NBA President Huanhua (Adam Silver) A more ambitious hope: let basketball catch up with football, eventually become the world's first movement.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)