Overwhelmed by fluid, fast-paced play, basketball fans have long thirsted for more: more statistics, more video replays, more analysis, more information. Now the NBA has partnered with SAP and STATS LLC to create a new, totally comprehensive statistical database that records everything that happens in every NBA game. And it’s free for fans all over the world at NBA.com/STATS on Monday, November 25.
The first step for the NBA was to augment human scorers with a six-camera setup that automates the recording of player data on the court. But there was a bigger problem: mashing up all that data in one instantly accessible platform for fans.
So why would the NBA go to such lengths to provide such a versatile and comprehensive database? “We’re marrying video and stats,” says Michael Gliedman, senior vice president and chief information officer for the NBA. “They each tell one story, but they complement each other.”
How The Video Box Score Works
This year, the NBA entered into a comprehensive partnership this season with STATS, the company responsible for Sports VU. Six cameras track players’ every move by way of a specific set of data points including, but not limited to players’ names, numbers, and the ball. The league records these statistics and stores them in three data centers, one for in-game tracking, one for historical data, and one for video. The data has been available now for almost a year. In partnership with SAP, however, the NBA hopes to put this information to better use for teams and fans alike.
“We’re using video to contextualize statistics, to tell better and better stories, which is what our fans want. So we asked ourselves, ‘How do we take what we made for the media and scale it in such a way to allow people to ask questions and have them answered immediately?’” says Gliedman.
The answer? HANA and the “Video Box Score.”
SAP developed their HANA real-time platform, an in-memory computing platform with a caching layer able to combine and process and display statistics with corresponding video at incredible speeds. With it, fans can compile any and all manner of statistics and videos of their favorite teams and players and cross-reference that data against any available measure–opposing teams/players, for instance.