Lights, Cameras, Revolution

“The NBA is undergoing an analytical transformation, and the Raptors are one of the teams at the forefront. For the first time, here is an exclusive, inside look at how SportVU is changing basketball.”

The most important innovation in the NBA in recent years is a camera-tracking system, known as SportVU, that records every movement on the floor and spits it back at its front-office keepers as a byzantine series of geometric coordinates. The Raptors' analytics team wrote insanely complex code that turned all those X-Y coordinates from every second of every recorded game into playable video files. The code can recognize everything; when a pick-and-roll occurred, where it occurred, whether the pick actually hit a defender, and the position of all 10 players on the floor as the play unfolded. The team also factored in the individual skill set of every NBA player, so the program understands that Chris Paul is much more dangerous from midrange than Rajon Rondo, and that Roy Hibbert is taller than Al Horford.

The ability to recognize individual player skills is crucial for the juiciest bit of what the Raptors have accomplished: The video demonstrate some “ghost players”, and they are doing what Toronto coaching staff and analytics team believes the players should have done on this play. The system has factored in Toronto's actual scheme and the expected point value of every possession as play evolves.