An invisible, powerful force is lifting
professional basketball to new heights.
Transforming how this multi-billion dollar
sport is played.
In elite sport, the difference between success and failure
is often the finest of margins.
Go Rockets, woo!
The Houston Rockets are one of the top teams
in NBA basketball.
They boast some of the sport's biggest stars,
including the NBA's Most Valuable Player in 2018.
Offensively what we were trying to do,
defensively what we were trying to do,
so the focus is trying to be on the same page
every position for every game.
In the past decade,
the Rockets have risen from mid-table mediocrity
to serious NBA Championship contenders.
It's not just big names that have
fueled this dramatic ascent, it's big data.
The data that we go over is definitely important,
you know, I think it gives us a little bit of an edge.
To keep a balance of data and instinct is a big thing.
The Rockets' recent success
owes much to their pioneering decision
to start crunching data about every aspect of their game.
And this is the man responsible.
Analytics has really permeated everything,
our edge has allowed us to win the most games,
65 last year.
Computer scientist Daryl Morey
is the sport's foremost data and statistics guru
among NBA bosses.
You can break winning down into two things,
one is how many points do you get per possession,
and then how do you get extra possessions?
Ten years ago, Daryl set out
to find that winning formula.
The Rockets were one of four NBA teams
to install a pioneering video tracking system,
which mined raw data from games.
What they discovered changed the way teams tried to win.
The data revealed which shots provided
the best bang for buck, two-point dunks,
and three-pointers, shot from outside the three point line,
rather than long-range two point shots from inside it.
It's pretty dramatic,
how powerful the three point shot is.
You only have to make a third of your three point shots
to be worth a half of your two.
Even within that, there's an extra miss
you might rebound offensively.
Face up, pulls the trigger, buries it!
In the 1990s, long two point shots
from just inside the three point line were common.
But Daryl's analysis showed that statistically,
these shots provided the worst return.
The number of attempted three point shots has increased
every year for the past decade.
In the 2017-18 season, the Rockets made more
three pointers than any other team in NBA history.
And this was a major reason they won more
games than any of their rivals.
Every percentage matters in sports,
and extracting those percentages
is what's really become much easier with data.
We're in a pretty big transformational stage in sport.
Professor Rajiv Maheswaran
co-founded Second Spectrum.
The analytics company gathers and codes
a vast range of increasingly granular data
for all 30 NBA teams.
It feels like two chess pieces.
Cameras now track and record
3D spacial data for every player and ball movement
at 25 frames per second.
Machine learning technology uses this huge volume of data
to produce interactive visualizations,
allowing teams to analyze the minutiae
of their performances, and achieve marginal gains on court.
At first we taught the machine about 20 terms,
right now it knows over 500 basketball terms.
So the machine is essentially the integrated knowledge
of all the elite basketball coaches.
There is a particular focus
on all important data around player movement,
and the probability of making a shot.
What we can do with the machine is to say
look at all the shots like this one,
and tell me the chance that the shot really could
go in either for this player or for an average player.
And you bring in all the things that a person can see,
not just where they're standing, but how they're moving,
what type of shot they're trying to take,
where are the defenders?
And what we can do is put a number
to what previously was a feeling, or something qualitative.
Data analysis has even changed
the type of players that successful teams,
like the Rockets, have.
Players today are on average leaner and more agile.
Having skilled players,
even if they're a little smaller,
is more important than having bigger guys
who are less skilled.
When it comes to recruiting new players
from the college draft each season,
poring over data on player performance
has given the Rockets a winning edge.
We've been able to eke out about a 5% edge,
and that actually turns out to be a massive advantage.
Pro basketball's finale for the NBA title.
Basketball has constantly changed,
but it's about to enter a brave new world,
where data could be court-side in the hands of coaches,
helping to swing a game as it happens.
The data's always getting faster and faster,
the data used to take hours,
we've got it down to minutes,
and very soon it'll be down to seconds.
It's basically going to become
functionally real-time very, very soon.
I don't think we've scratched the surface
of what's possible with data.