
The Toronto Raptors are using IBM’s Watson in the draft - ericzawo
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/toronto-raptors-nba-draft-day-ibm-watson
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n72
I have the feeling the reporter doesn't know what they're talking about:

"For example, if the Raptors were measuring college basketball prospects,
Watson could quickly crunch the numbers and display a comparison of their
stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds."

One most assuredly does not need Watson to do this.

Moreover,

"Compare that to drafts of past years, in which the Raptors would use
whiteboards with player stats printed on magnets, and call up statisticians
each time they wanted new information"

Does not seem it could be remotely true, given...

"Even before Watson came along, the Raptors were tech-savvy. They have access
to one of the NBA’s leading analytics teams, and have developed a wide range
of tools, including a way to use data from the SportVU camera tracking system
to model the best moves a player could make."

~~~
Zigurd
I suspect the problem is not entirely with the reporter. The reporter is
probably paraphrasing a press release describing a really minimal effort to
apply Watson to a something that would grab some publicity. IBM and the
Raptors' PR people probably put in more work than was done on the
implementation. Which is why it sounds like something you could whip up in a
spreadsheet. It probably does "display a comparison of their stats on
shooting, assists, and rebounds" on a Web page with the Watson logo on it, and
the reporter faithfully reported what he saw.

Watson is more of IBM's tool for creating the impression that IBM is a
technology company and not just a systems integration shop than it is a
serious deep learning project. Eventually it will become another tragic
chapter among many in the decline of technology at IBM.

I predict sometime in the near future, when Apple and Google and Microsoft and
others build some real businesses on deep learning systems that there will be
a mournful article published about how sad and left behind Watson has become.

~~~
cmdrfred
The name might be worth something. Everyone knows Watson due to the Jeopardy
stuff. "New from IBM and Amazon, Watson in your home!"*

*It's just Alexa with a male voice and some tweaks from IBM.

~~~
Zigurd
At this point, IBM is the Radio Shack of computing. nobody knows what the
brand means anymore.

~~~
Retra
That's because they're better known as a hardware and systems company, but
they're trying to pivot to an analytics and cloud services company.

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chollida1
I've spent more time than any sane person should trying to model fantasy
sports for the purpose of making money as a psuedo hobby/second job.

My day job is essentially practical applications of simulation and machine
learning so this was a natural way to broaden my modelling capabilities.

I'd love to chat with anyone who has any specific insight as to what the
raptors are doing. If you're in Toronto I'll buy lunch!! Contact info in my
profile.

Specifically a focus on methods applicable to selecting teams for Fantasy
Hockey and Football with applications to weekly/daily fantasy is mostly what
I'm concerned with.

I've spent alot of time/money figuring out what doesn't work very well so I
can offer 3 years of failed experiments as a trade:)

~~~
NikolaNovak
They are using the "Watson Tradeoff Analytics" product as the underpinning [1]

As others have mentioned, "Watson" is a brandname/pillar at IBM, similar to
Infosphere (anything information management), Websphere (anything
middleware-y), etc. It's a bunch of simple and complex, in-house-built and
bought products, some of which play together well some of which don't, some of
which were pretty impressive and some of which aren't.

To play with Watson Tradeoff Analytics, you can check out the documentation or
get a free account with Bluemix [2]. They used to have a subset-of-
functionality demo for Raptors on Bluemix as well. It seemed nifty but not
groud-breaking.

My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson
Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit,
i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on paper.

[disclosure: I work for IBM... nowhere _NEAR_ Watson, in the plain-ol'-ERP
department, but I've been curious myself to figure out what the hoopla is or
isn't all about]

[1]
[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/tradeoff-
analytics.html)

[2] [https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff-
ana...](https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/services/tradeoff-analytics)

~~~
sk5t
> My understanding is that for the real-thing, they also used the Watson
> Tone/Sentiment analyzers to see if players would be culturally a good fit,
> i.e. get along with their team-mates, not just whether they're good on
> paper.

This seems reeeeally unlikely, considering both the inaccuracy of Watson
sentiment analysis, and that one would need to collect a rather substantial
personal writing sample from each candidate.

~~~
dantiberian
The article mentions that they mine social media accounts of the players for
the text. That could easily qualify as a substantial personal writing sample
:)

~~~
giarc
That's great for college players, but not necessarily good for pro players,
many of which don't control their twitter output (or have to sensor themselves
much more than a college player would).

~~~
trentlott
Well at least Watson will pick players who have complimentary PR firms...

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raverbashing
Ok, here's the deal

Let's stop helping IBM by publishing their press-releases

Watson means _nothing_. They have some APIs and that's it

Others players have a better product.

I'm not one to help IBM advertise for free

~~~
revelation
I love it, because two things are abundantly clear to even the most casual
observer:

1) everyone at IBM has been told to pretend they are this huge, leading
"cloud" company

2) 1) is a clear falsehood

And so you see marketing struggle to come up with all these ridiculous "case
studies", because it's difficult if you have to invent them out of thin air
instead of real customers.

~~~
hvindin
As someone who works for IBM I'd have to disagree with you there. No one has
ever told me we are a huge cloud company, I mean obviously I've been told
we're investing buckets of money in cloud technologies and that we have made
it a key strategy point to focus on growth in the area, but not once has
anyone even intimated that we ' _are_ [a] huge cloud company'.

What IBM is, realistically, is a ridiculously large (and I actually mean
ridiculous in the sense of 'how are they not under _more_ anti-trust
investigations because they seriously own roughly everything") company with an
unbelievably large number of very vert wealthy clients who are scared beyond
reason of losing their market share if they don't start using <Insert "new"
technology here> so internally everything that happens and looks like a
publicity stunt is usually met with a response of "Well no shit we could do
that. Why the hell didn't our marketing team point out that we had that
capability in the 90's when it would have been impressive"

A lot of the Watson hype seems to actually be because a lot of the companies
who traditionally would say 'hm, I dunno about this whole analytics thing.
Shouldnt we just stick to spreadsheets and man hours' now have a named _thing_
they can buy that really just covers up that they are actually just investing
in a platform with some hadoop clustering and some racks full of P8s
(obviously theres a little more to it than that).

The fact that watson can do seemingly cool stuff is actually just a nice way
of saying 'anyone can do cool stuff if they invest a bit of cash in
technologies that have been around for ages but large companies now have a
small window where they can start investing in these technologies and they
even get to act like they are an early adopter, of course sans-risk'

I find it amusing that our sales pitch to a rugby team in australia to sell
them analytics tools and services failed about 4 years ago, so we gave it to
them for free then said we would tell them who the next 10 players to get
injured would be and how they would be injured. After the predictions were
exactly correct at about injury 6 they were suddenly very interested in buying
the stuff. Interestingly, if we sold the same thing now it wouldn't be an
analytics platform, we would probably use watson (read: not rebuild that
thing, just use the existing stuff because its easier) and it would be
marketed as a "watson solution".

~~~
guitarbill
Because it's so big, there's a lot capable engineers, but also deadwood. I
think Watson has attracted many capable devs. There's definitely too many
execs flailing around with buzzwords.

It's a great brand, it has potential. The problem is that a) it's being
overhyped and b) yet again IBM doesn't understand that if you want it to be
used for truly mind-blowing stuff, you have to make it easy for developers to
use (or maybe they do, but suck at making it easy to use, see [1]). Then it
generates its own, real hype.

For an example of this, I'd say MQ vs MQTT/RabbitMQ, DB2 vs Postgres et al.,
NoSQL, analytics, Bluemix vs Amazon/GCE/Heroku, Softlayer vs
Amazon/Google/Azure. I get that selling to traditional, conservative, and very
rich/big firms is a viable strategy - but one that's failing for e.g. Bluemix,
Softlayer.

\---

[1] The Google search results for "Watson API" suck. The documentation sounds
like it was written for managers (" Representational State Transfer (REST)
Application Programming Interface (API) "). Stop getting me to use Bluemix,
Amazon/GCE/Heroku work better. Just look at this mess:
[https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...](https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/getting_started/gs-
full-nodejs.shtml)

------
danvoell
I think it's great that there continues to be a stream of "Watson partners
with X" or "Watson is used for X" articles, but in actual usage, it feels like
Google is winning the ML race. I feel like corporations are using Watson for
easy PR wins. Is that just me living in my own development bubble?

------
analyst74
My limited understanding with basketball stats is that they are only somewhat
useful, as it favours player who have direct impact to the game, those who can
score/assist/rebound/etc, and encourages players to game the system.

However it does not reflect how a player defends, how he fits into a
particular style/role, how much support his teammates get from him other than
assists, etc.

It'll be interesting to see if they use deeper analysis to figure out which
player is actually better.

~~~
endtime
Honest if potentially naive question: why can't you just measure points per
minute by the player's team's opponents when the player is on versus off the
court?

~~~
astazangasta
Because this doesn't guarantee a uniform background.

Let's say we have two teams, the Ayyys and the Bees; each has two defenders,
Schlub and Superman play for the Ayys, and Scrub and Slacker play for the
Bees. Let's assume that they all suck equally, except for Superman, who is
great.

Now we run your statistic: we compare how the Ayyys do with Schlub on/off
against how Scrub does on/off.

The problem is, when Schlub is off, Superman is playing, whereas when Scrub is
off, Slacker is playing. This means the Ayyys do quite well when Schlub is
off, but the Bees do about as well when Scrub is on compared to when Scrub is
off. By this comparison, Schlub is a much _worse_ player than Scrub, even
though in actual fact they might be equivalent.

~~~
Spendar89
ESPN introduced a stat called real plus-minus in 2014, which adjusts for
teammates and opponents. It also takes both offensive and defense plus-minus
into account. The top two players in RPM this past season were Lebron James
and Draymond Green, followed by Chris Paul and Steph Curry [1]. It was
received with a lot of skepticism back when it was introduced, but that
shouldn't surprise anyone.

1\.
[http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM](http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM)

------
danso
> _For example, if the Raptors were measuring college basketball prospects,
> Watson could quickly crunch the numbers and display a comparison of their
> stats on shooting, assists, and rebounds. Compare that to drafts of past
> years, in which the Raptors would use whiteboards with player stats printed
> on magnets, and call up statisticians each time they wanted new information,
> recalled Lenchner, who visited the Raptors’ headquarters while IBM was
> developing the software. In the days before Watson, the whole process was
> much more laborious and time consuming._

I like Watson and it's not their fault for getting publicity...but as for the
reporter, c'mon, there's no way you could write that above paragraph without
being ignorant of computers pre-Macintosh (or iPod) days. Perhaps the Raptors
are old-fashioned but computers have been used for exponentially reducing
laborious and time-consuming activities since the dawn of the airlines for
solving scheduling problems. And that was much later than the era of computing
used for early censuses and cryptoanalysis during the World Wars. But if
you've grown up in the "there's an app for that!" age, I guess it's easy to
forget how infinite the use cases for computers.

~~~
pboutros
The use case outlined is solvable by a spreadsheet. IBM continues to put
marketing first, product second.

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415Kathleem
I remember seeing Watson on Jeopardy years ago. He is not quite in the same
league as Mr. Butlertron from Clone High, but he's pretty good all the same.

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SolarNet
> “[Watson could be used] for the mission to Mars,” he said. After all, that
> small crew will be crammed together on a spaceship for a few years at least,
> and getting along will be essential. “You can’t make changes once they’re up
> there.”

So IBM does end up making HAL...

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notsrg
Shit is hot up in the 6

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bpowers
Catchy story that solicits moneyball storyline to NBA draft and takes it to
the next level... Wait for the movie

