

The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution - swanson
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9068903/the-toronto-raptors-sportvu-cameras-nba-analytical-revolution

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nickalewis
Great article. As a huge NBA & NFL fan, It's intriguing to see the front
offices of some of these teams begin to think outside of the box when it comes
to player development. I think that's the most interesting opportunity here --
the practice of "watching film" is now innovative enough to not only help
prepare for opponents, but also provide coaches a better macro view of what to
work on with specific players in the short & long term. Especially in coaching
behavior "off the ball". Thats always a game changer.

The ghost AI is pretty impressive as well. I was skeptical at first as to how
authentic this type of "player AI" would be, considering the program makes
assumptions based on historical numbers and any athlete/coach would certainly
argue that its different in-game, however this says a ton:

> That's brutal, and it's not a coincidence that the only team that
> consistently mirrors the help defense of its ghosts is Miami, Rucker says.
> The Heat have three of the best wing defenders in the league in Shane
> Battier, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade, and the latter two are among the
> NBA's most gifted pure athletes. James can mimic DeRozan's hyperactive ghost
> in a way no other player can, Rucker says. "LeBron basically messes up the
> system and the ghosts," Rucker says. "He does things that are just
> unsustainable for most players."

Not a huge Miami fan (Go BULLS!) but you can't deny their defensive effort.

Thanks for sharing!

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osdf
Btw. Shane Battier (back then with the Rockets) was mentioned in a new york
times piece on NBA and Stats some years ago:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

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wazoox
Wow, memories. In 1998 I worked on the FIFA World Cup graphics, and two guys
on the team were developing a camera player tracking and stat acquisition
system. Back then, raw CPU power was a real limitation; the fastest PCs were
PII 333 Mhz and they just couldn't track automatically 22 players from 4
cameras (one atop each corner of the stadium).

In the end the system was _almost_ working, however we needed two people
watching the TV stream and clicking on players to identify them when the
automated system lost track. However it provided already tremendously detailed
stats, but unfortunately nobody really cared :)

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GFischer
Some former classmates of mine are still working on it, they provide analytics
for the Uruguay soccer team among others:

<http://www.kizanaro.com/web/index.php?lang=en>

most of the input is still manual as you mention.

They were recognized by MIT Technology Review :) (in Spanish)

[http://www.technologyreview.es/tr35argentinayuruguay/profile...](http://www.technologyreview.es/tr35argentinayuruguay/profile.aspx?trid=1334)

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recroad
As a long-time Raptors fan and the co-founder/owner of the most read Raptors
blog, I can confirm that none of this technology has helped the Raptors.

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muyuu
Seems to me like too many players in the Raptors are lacking stamina for such
an intense defense system as that system produces. They would be gassed in no
time.

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mmc
The "ghost" players in these animated replays that show where the system
thinks a player should have been are fascinating to see. I wonder how
automatic it is - if games could be analyzed like that without much expert
input, this would be a really cool thing to have for recreational teams who
want to get better but can't afford expert coaching. I'm thinking my late-
night adult league hockey team would probably benefit from some replays like
this.

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the_watcher
Unfortunately the cameras are pricey enough that only 15 of 30 NBA teams have
purchased them, not to mention the half decade of work it took the Raptors to
build the code to actually generate the visualizations. Maybe someday it will
be commercially available and affordable, but that day seems a long way off to
me.

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ssharp
I'm wondering why the 15 other teams aren't on board yet. If the price is only
100k, it's nothing to an NBA team. If those other 15 teams don't already have
an advanced analytics team in place, then it makes sense not to have the
camera until you have a structure in place to make sure of the camera data.

It will be interesting with this huge push in basketball over the past couple
years to see where this type of analysis leads. The NBA model right now is
pretty simple: get two or three superstars, align them with solid role
players, and play in championships. It's hard to imagine analytics pushing a
team like Houston to be able to beat a team like Miami or Oklahoma City in a
seven-game series because the talent gap is so substantial. Houston can play a
smarter game but the other teams still function better. What I could see
happening, however, if a team like Oklahoma City, while slightly less talented
than Miami, can implement insights from this analysis to raise their EV, it
might overcome the slightly smaller talent gap. Even in that small sense, it
makes more to spend a couple million a year on analytics than it does to pay
an average NBA player several million. Since the NBA has both a salary cap and
maximum contracts, it pushes the price of an average play up quite a bit, so
better value may be had by raising the effectiveness of your current talent
than trying to bring in new players.

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the_watcher
I completely agree, but, as referenced in the article, there is still pretty
strong resistance to analytics-driven decision making in the NBA. Many NBA
coaches and GM's are former players, who generally resist advanced stats.
Hence "it can't measure personality, chemistry, heart." That quote fails to
mention neither can anything else, so it makes much more sense to focus on
what _can_ be measured than on what can't (I'll concede personality should in
some cases be taken into account if there are clear clashes).

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dfxm12
Forget the advanced stats, it also elucidates the best defensive/offensive
scheme for the team. That's part of a coach's job description right there.
It's probably also not much of a stretch to encroach on the scouts' & GM's
territory too - How will our team look if we trade Lopez for Howard? - for
example.

When the system gets more optimized and easier to use, the role of a coach &
GM could get diminished, and with it, their salaries. Of course they would do
everything in their power to stop that.

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the_watcher
Except for the coaches who embrace it. When the Mavericks hired Rick Carlisle,
a big reason they hired him was that in Indiana he had consistently used his
teams best lineups, and in his interviews expressed a strong interest in
embracing analytics (which, with Mark Cuban as your owner, you won't ever lack
the resources to get the best analytics). In baseball, the best (in terms of
wins/resources) team is the Rays, who hired investment bankers as their GM and
have a coach who listens to the sabermatricians, platooning like crazy and
shifting the infield all over.

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kevinthew
To the uninitiated, and those who like sports analytics (specifically the
NBA), you should absolutely follow Zach Lowe's articles on Grantland and
elsewhere. He's the best sports writer on the subject, and probably the only
coherent one at that.

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swang
All the analytics in the world won't save you if your GM is Colangelo.

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balakk
The camera presumably is overhead. From that perspective, what could be a
useful feature for person tracking? I am assuming it wont be that easy to
pickup just numbers of their jerseys. Faces are also not easy to get from that
angle. Or do they have multiple cameras in place?

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pitt1980
probably use 2 - 3 camera to triangluate location

if you only have to idenitify 24 people, you could probably do that on height
plus some other physical dimension

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osdf
Or with some Machine Learning: Identifying Players in Broadcast Sports Videos
using Conditional Random Fields, CVPR 2011.

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pitt1980
cool link, thanks

found this:

Our natural gait, it turns out, defines us as humans. Not speaking broadly —
that we’re only truly bipedal mammal on the earth, blah blah blah — but as
individuals. Researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can
identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.

This sort of research has been underway since the late 1990s, picking up more
urgency after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the
London train attack in 2005. DARPA and Homeland Security, among others, are
keenly interested in video analysis programs that can separate out and analyze
an individual gait, then use this like fingerprints. DARPA has been sponsoring
“human identification at a distance” studies since 2000, which often combines
gait analysis with facial and gesture analysis. It’s a hot field right now,
and has been heralded as a less invasive approach than retina scans or blood
tests or fingerprinting. One study I read on the algorithms of walking put the
appeal simply: “Advantages include the fact that it does not require subject
cooperation or body contact, and the sensor may be located remotely.”

<http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article01181302.aspx>

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awongh
that is some really cool tech. I wonder if the camera reads the player's
numbers on their jerseys when they go onto the court?

I could imagine a cool realtime consumer version of this for all kinds of
sports where you get an instant replay type of thing projected onto some kind
of madden/video game type avatars: unpause and play any game from any instant
in the game you're watching.

