🏀 KuBuckets Archive

For those who are data geeks:

This Guy’s Quest to Track Every Shot in the NBA Changed Basketball Forever ↗

Mark McClusky • Wired Magazine

Goldsberry called his system CourtVision, and it showed differences in players no one had ever quantified. Ray Allen, one of the NBA's best shooters, had several deadly hot zones from three-point range, and he barely attempted any midrange jumpers. Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers' dynamic star, took lots of shots from all over the court, but there were places that, if you were playing against him, you'd prefer he shoot from (like the baseline, because he struggled to convert from there). Goldsberry had generated nothing less than an instant visual signature of a player's offensive game, easy to read and understand. This went way beyond what a smart analyst or coach might intuit from courtside. The more you studied the CourtVision maps, the more insights they revealed.

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@bskeet

Very cool. We had a link posted on here months ago to another site that had this on all pro players, just not quite as pretty graphics.

I'm certain it will be coming for D1, probably this year however the digital logistics are considerably more challenging because of the number of teams (and players) and the consistency of record keeping varies from school to school.

Hey... I see search tags added now to this site... great job, guys!

@bskeet

First, thank you for this post! I knew people had to be taking these steps spatially but I did not find them. You did!!!!

Second, what this guy is doing, and even his students, is primitive in where this leads.

The future is mapping emotions in space.

Each spatial dynamic, i.e., event path through space-time has another mappable dimension that is critical to outcomes.

Mind-body state.

Players will soon be able to wear technology that monitors their body chemistry, brain waves, postures, and muscular-emotional patterns applied to achieve given percentages of success in given tasks on a floor. Smart watches, then smart fabric uniforms, then embedded chips will enable this data collection, and overlaying on today's mapped events of play and we will see/understand the musculo-skeletal-emotional states needed to trigger on offense and defense the desirable path events.

We are on the cusp of a nonlinear convergence of mapped realms: mind, body and motion.

The convergence will occur, when software emerges, like from classified military research into fighter pilot dynamics, that enables mapping and simulation and analysis of mind-body-motion paths.

A combination of mind and body states/paths are triggers of motion outcomes.

Knowing where Ray Allen is hot is child's play.

Knowing what mapped path of mind and body coincides with the heat is like laying the wind and ocean current data on a map of oceans. It gives us the forces we need to use to get where we want to go.

I have followed Drew Cannon for much of his time with Butler and he does a lot of this type of stuff and more. When HCBS hired Doc Sadler as Director of Basketball Operations I was hoping he would have hired Drew Cannon to crunch numbers for KU. You can check out this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Cannon ↗ or just google this guy and read about some of his work. Its really cool stuff!

More Drew Cannon stuff here http://kenpom.com/blog/index.php/weblog/author/2. ↗ This is really cool and a must read if you enjoy this stuff!