Big-time athletes have swarms of business managers and lawyers to handle the day-to-day affairs. But the those starting from the bottom — the guys on 10-day contracts, and rookie-scale deals — may not have that luxury. The NBA Players Union is hoping to ease the burden on these players by offering a new smartphone app specifically for members.
The app was developed by SportsBlog.com, who has made similar products for the WNBA and NBA Retired Players Association. We can’t get a peek at it, for obvious reasons, but the idea is to help players by passing along important information as well as allowing their input for union business.
SportsBlog.com’s chief officer, Kevin April, sounded optimistic about the future of the app, saying that they are “just getting started and we have an ambitious roadmap ahead of us that will deliver even more capabilities to NBA players, their union, and even their fans.”
While being even a low-paid bench player might sound like a better job than most, many of these athletes are still very young adults. Any young person getting started in life needs a hand every now and then. The NBA Players Union is looking to ease the transition by keeping important information just a few taps away.
CNET recently ran a story in which it dubbed the Golden State Warriors’ next arena “the stadium of the future.” With the arena scheduled to open in 2018, team executives are experimenting with new technology. “We can’t light this [new arena] up already being out of date,” said vice president of digital and marketing Kenny Lauer. And, being in the Bay Area, it’s tech’s home team. This should be the stadium of the future when some of Silicon Valley’s finest are at every game.
It seems the most successful experiment so far has been with iBeacons, an Apple product that uses a Bluetooth low-energy signal to notify iOS users as they approach or pass an iBeacon. The Warriors use the tech to alert fans about seat upgrades, discounts at the team store and concession deals. It can also be used to map out an arena and help you find the nearest bathroom to your that beer line you’re going to wait in. But the Warriors don’t offer this solution, yet.
The Warriors will soon roll out sound amplification, which broadcasts sound from microphones placed on the court through the arena’s speakers. Now the dribbling ball on the hardwood, squeaky sneakers and Steph Curry’s sweet swishes won’t just be for the front row fans. During the five-game trial, the Warriors will broadcast to an entire side of the venue.
And then there’s LiFi, which the Warriors are exploring. It’s like WiFi, but uses light rather than radio frequencies to transmit data via LED bulbs. It has a much wider bandwidth and has reached data rates of over 10 gigabits per second. The range is shorter because light waves cannot penetrate walls, but it’s cheaper to maintain than its counterpart. How would the Warriors use it? They’re still trying to figure that out.
They are building two groups, one to focus on the tech and another that will determine how to integrate that tech in to the fan experience.
“Thinking about the challenges we have with Wi-Fi and the available frequency space in the visual light spectrum, the opportunities are unreal,” Lauer told CNET. “These are the kinds of things that are fascinating.”
And while all of this does sound intriguing, I don’t think it completely resolves issues fans have that keep them away from live sporting events. The biggest, most obvious challenge teams face selling tickets is the cost. Let’s assume this won’t be fixed, and focus on some other issues I want to see in my stadium of the future.
Designers of future stadiums aim to mix technology and sustainability. But sustainability is boring. I don’t really care how you make it 70 degrees in the arena, just make it 70 degrees. So let’s let the municipalities worry about that. Here’s what I want to see.
Bathroom Roombas
You know how one guy sober guy doesn’t always get every drop into the toilet even in his own home? Imagine 20,000 men, half of them drunk, rushing to pee between plays in a jam-packed bathroom that isn’t one they have to clean. Then, imagine how many will vomit in same said bathroom. It’s pretty freaking filthy. I want Roombas constantly sweeping through legs and around feet, spotting moisture and soaking it up. I don’t want to worry about soaking my Converse in the leftovers of the beer Kevin in Riverside pounded three hours earlier in the parking lot.
Robots
While the mix of high school drop outs and senior citizens bumping in to each other in a crowded concession stand is entertaining for two minutes, it becomes frustrating and time consuming. I want to order, pay and pick up my food so I can get back to the game. And frankly, the current system isn’t working, except when it’s a Wednesday night game in September in Miami with the Padres in town.
I want Johnny Five of Short Circuit taking my order quickly, efficiently and accurately. Send emo Jade and grandma Helen to parking lot duty.
Speaking of parking lots…
Maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy, but I hate fighting traffic to get to a game, hunt for parking and then battle 15,000 other vehicles to leave the stadium via three exits. I want sensors that indicate open parking spots I can view on an app that will direct me to open spots. When it’s time to leave, I want to use the same app to avoid the most severe congestion so that I don’t have to spend 45 minutes listening to the callers on the post-game AM radio show theorize why Albert Pujols didn’t bunt with the tying run on second and no outs in the bottom of the tenth. I just want to get home and get to sleep. I’ve got stuff to do the next day.
Mute buttons
I don’t want to listen to that Top 40 music blaring during play of a NBA game. MUTE. Hey, Oakland A’s fan. You’re being a total jerk and I don’t want to risk you throwing your turkey leg at my head when I turn around after telling you to shut up, or getting stabbed walking out of the stadium, or my heart exploding because you’re stressing me out. MUTE. What, 3-year-old daughter I brought to the game because my tickets didn’t sell online? You want cotton candy and you have to pee and you want to start the wave? MUTE.
This is just a start. What do you want to see in your stadium of the future?
This offseason, Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari told those who approach basketball from a purely analytical standpoint and have never played the game to “beat it.” So it was mildly surprising when the program announced the hiring of Joel Justus as their Director of Analytics this past September.
In a recent profile of Justus by Ben Herald of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Justus said of getting hired, “[Calipari] wanted someone who would be able to talk ball with him. And I think that’s a little bit of the criticism when you talk to folks in the NBA: ‘All right, you’re giving me all of this stuff, but what does it mean?’”
Basketball analytics hirings aren’t new for the NBA, but the coming out party for analytics positions in the college ranks occurred just over a year ago when Drew Cannon emerged as a driving force behind Brad Stevens’ success at Butler. Cannon has since followed Stevens to the Boston Celtics. With the currently undefeated Wildcats hiring Justus, it’s a trend that is sure to continue.
Basketball analysts can provide all sorts of insight to improve team performance, like optimal lineups, tempo-free stats, and video analysis. But this wasn’t why Calipari hired Justus. Ever the salesman, Calipari hired Justus in order to market his players to NBA scouts. This is because Kentucky is so loaded this year that Calipari is playing two platoons of five players, switching them out like hockey lines.
Calipari revealed his motivations for hiring Justus at a pre-season luncheon. “If you’re playing 20 minutes, what will your NCAA stats look like? Terrible for NCAA stats, so we’re going to have big data stats, per-minute and efficiency stats that we can send to NBA teams.” Calipari later said that he’s never coach a team this way and his change in mindset was to make sure “every one of these kids eats.”
It’s unlikely that the platoon system will become a permanent fixture of the Kentucky program, and Justus certainly seems to understand this. As he told the Herald-Leader, “I’ve got to make sure that [Calipari] sees that I’m valuable. So I have to make sure that what I’m giving him is good.”
As the premier huckster in college basketball (NBA players he has coached have made a combined $820 million in salaries), Calipari has made another canny move for his program, ensuring his players will have a seat at the NBA table for years to come.
With the seemingly inexorable rise in the price of sports programming, it seemed inevitable that cable operators would have to charge subscribers for the privilege of watching American sports. According to Multichannel News, that time has already come with Time Warner Cable, as they have announced that they will be adding a $2.75 sports surcharge to subscribers’ bills starting in January 2015.
In the announcement, Time Warner cable claimed that the cost of cable sports programming has risen 91% since 2008, and according to Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth, the average cost of a regional sports network has has risen 52 percent over the past five years. This is certainly conceivable with the types of TV deals being reached in the past few years, like the 9-year $24 billion NBA-ESPN deal in October of this year.
In Forbes, Maury Brown noted the irony of Time Warner’s announcement after their struggle to get distribution for SportsNet LA, the regional sports network they manage. The costs of carrying the channel jumped after they made a 25-year deal worth over $8.35 billion to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games. This led to a standoff between TWC and other cable operators like DirecTV for distribution rights, leading nearly 70% of Los Angeles area residents unable to watch Dodgers broadcasts this past season.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling against cable disruptor Aereo, and with John McCain’s Television Consumer Freedom Act having little hope of passage in Congress, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for governmental intervention in the cable arena. Regardless, speculationof an approachingsports cable bubble persists. However, it will likely take years for this bubble to burst, requiring an increasing rate of cord-cutting and rising prices for cable subscribers.
As the NBA as a whole continues its light-speed advancements in advanced data analysis, the Milwaukee Bucks are investing in the face to gain an edge in player evaluation.
AsThe New York Times reported Thursday, the new owners of the Bucks – hedge fund billionaries Wesley Edens and Mark Lasry – hired renowned facial coding expert Dan Hill to build an emotion metrics database in an attempt to quantify the previously unquantifiable – character, personality and chemistry.
Hill uses methods developed from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Published in 1979, FACS based combinations of 43 facial muscle positions which correspond to seven emotions: happiness, surprise, contempt, disgust, sadness, anger and fear. Today, FACS has been established as a computed automated system which detects faces in videos and spits out quantified data based on every smirk, furrowed eyebrow and smile a player makes.
“Actions speak louder than words,” Hill told ESPN of muscle movements in the face.
He said players that score highly in his evaluations have only a moderate degree of happiness. He doesn’t want to see players too easily satisfied, and says that it identifies coachable players. Meanwhile, players that score highly in happiness tend to become sloppy.
Hill, whose 16 years of facial analysis have mostly been for marketing and advertising, also values disgust and anger, as they show levels of drive. Of course, it all comes in moderation, as high levels of anger lead to a hot head. Finally, cocky expressions are good, while arrogance on one’s face is a bad sign.
The Bucks hired Hill — owner of Sensory Logic, Inc. in Minnesota and the author of Emotionomics — in May, and he’s already made his mark. Working alongside team psychologist Ramel Smith, Hill watched video of potential draft picks, assessed the players and reported back to Smith. The Bucks considered Australian point guard Dante Exum with their second overall pick, but ultimately grabbed Jabari Parker, who was one of the top rookies in the league before a knee injury ended his season.
“Nothing against Exum, but emotional resiliency, stability and an immediate, assured presence were all key considerations in support of selecting Parker,” Hill told the Times.
Facial coding isn’t widely accepted. Until now, more interest has come from law enforcement and anti-terrorism agencies, along with marketing, rather than academia.
“To me the big question is, how well does the method actually work?” said Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with the Times. “It’s not easy to get good evidence, because a player’s performance and teamwork are complex outcomes, and the teams are not run like clinical trials, with coaches and managers blind to the facial coding findings and so forth. So it’s hard to know whether this system works well, gives some marginal benefit or does nothing at all.”
Facial coding has made waves in another sport as well. Jeff Foster runs the NLF’s scouting combine and hired Hill in 2011 to evaluate prospects. He said Hill’s methods could be especially helpful for teams considering quarterbacks and safeties early in the draft, as those players require unusual leadership and cerebral traits difficult to project.
Washington State head coach Mike Leach had Hill evaluate players in 2012. He was just hired and wanted to know what kind of players he inherited to develop his coaching methods around.
“Someday Dan will be able to get hard data linking the face to on-the-field performance, and I don’t want to miss that,” Leach told the Times.
Not one to be behind the curve, I’m pretty sure Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow has already left Hill 17 voice messages.
Starting tonight, Orlando Magic fans have a new way to pay for those ten dollar cold ones.
The Magic is the first team in the National Basketball Association to offer Apple Pay to its customers. To start, it will only be available at 60 concession and retail locations throughout the Amway Center. However, the team will be expanding locations during the season and aim to reach 200 for the start of the 2015-16 season.
This, however, will not be Apple Pay’s debut in professional sports. MLB Advanced Media paid an undisclosed figure to install more than 300 terminals at Kauffman Stadium and AT&T Park in October for the World Series, marking the first use of the service at any sports facility. Meanwhile, down on the farm, the minor league Akron RubberDucks announced in October that it will accept Apple Pay at Canal Park for the 2015 season.
Here’s how it works. Using a near-field communication (NFC) chip, the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus will send a payment to a store or restaurant’s reader when the user holds or waves the phone while keeping a finger on the Touch ID home button, which uses fingerprint recognition security. The payment will be processed using credit card information entered in the Passbook app that will assign a device an account number, which is encrypted and securely stored. Each transaction is authorized with a one-time unique dynamic security code. All major credit card companies are on board, as are a growing number of banking institutions and credit unions. Unfortunately, older iPhone models are not able to use the Apple Pay feature.
Ideally, a customer would wait in line to buy food. After ordering, the cashier rings up the cost, and the customer pulls out the phone, holds the Touch ID button, waves it in front of the reader and the payment is complete. This should take, what, ten seconds? Can we dream of an in-stadium experience where we won’t miss two innings waiting in line for a hot dog and a beer?
Alex Martins, chief executive of the Orlando Magic, told the New York Timesearlier this week:
“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from our fans is that the food and beverage lines are too long,” Mr. Martins said in an interview. “It keeps them from going to the concession stand because they don’t want to miss the action. This, and technologies like Apple Pay, will speed up our service.”
To be fair, it’s not like what Apple is doing is anything new. Samsung, MasterCard and Google Wallet have been around for some time. The optimism is that because of Apple’s reputation and giant consumer draw, any problems that existed with previous tap-to-pay services will evaporate.
For now, the Apple Pay experience is raw. Anecdotal reports reflect retailers don’t know how to use the system correctly, if at all. And that Apple training retailers would go a long way to create a much smoother experience. Fast Company’s technology editor Harry McCracken went a week without his wallet, only using Apple Pay to make his Whole Foods and McDonald’s purchases. And while he faced plenty of problems, McCracken, as he wrote in October, is hopeful about the future of the product.
But even though my experience with Apple Pay wasn’t perfect, and despite obstacles such as recalcitrant retailers, I had a good time using it. I expect to reach for my phone rather than my billfold quite often from now on—partly for convenience’s sake, and partly for the privacy and security benefits of being able to pay a store without sharing any information about myself. And if mobile payments finally start to catch on—which seems likely to me—we could end up looking back on last week as the most important moment so far in the history of the technology.
Word is the Google Cardboard toy — which started as a gimmick, is now a toy, and will soon be a tool, I suspect — now has over 500,000 users.
This got me thinking: We already have mini-cameras we can embed in the ground; we have 360° camera technology; and now we have cheap, accessible virtual reality (VR).
Isn’t it time for 360° MLB.tv? Perhaps a camera embedded neatly in front of home plate or the pitcher’s mound. Maybe on the back of the mound to watch closeup up as the shortstop flips a double-play ball to the second baseman.
Google Cardboard could rapidly democratize the world of VR customers.
Or what about mounting a 3D camera on the cable-tugged NFL sky view cameras? Allow fans to watch the play unfold while focusing on just their fantasy wide receiver, finally giving them the vindication to scream at the quarterback, “He’s wide open! Throw it to James Jones already!”
And doesn’t NASCAR already have cameras mounted on every vehicle? Would it be any more difficult to swap in a 360 model?
The technology is probably not a point just yet where a 360 camera can be safely embedded into a soccer pitch or — certainly not — a basketball court or hockey rink. But goal post cross bars, tops of basketball backboards and jumbotrons dangling from stadium roofs could all be reasonable and fun locations for VR watchers.
Think about it, sports execs. Because it would be awesome.
The idea of using technology and analytics to improve one’s skill set is no longer relegated to the pros. There are already plenty of offerings available to the consumer to help them with their tennis/golf/baseball/etc. And while other companies have tried to breach the basketball market, ShotTracker is touting a new easy and (fairly) affordable way to track your improvements on the court.
The idea behind ShotTracker is fairly simple. A combination of a wearable wrist sensor and a device secured to the net of the basket work together to help track shot attempts, makes, and misses. All that data is then beamed to a smartphone or tablet for further analysis. But the app goes beyond simple counting. Users can create custom drills and workouts, take a look at their shot map, and even follow the progress of friends and teammates.
ShotTracker’s shot map feature. (Courtesy of shottracker.com)
ShotTracker also offers functionality for coaches. Custom workouts can be created and assigned to players. Coaches can also see which players have been practicing and which haven’t, and get a breakdown of who is improving in which areas.
ShotTracker provides something that can often go missing in practice sessions: structure. It becomes easy to just kind of mess around without knowing if you’re improving or not. With the ability to create drills around a particular skill or facet, and a way to empirically gauge improvement, ShotTracker takes the guesswork out of practice.
ShotTracker is available now for $150, which includes a wrist sensor, wrist band, shooting sleeve, and net sensor.
If Kirk Goldsberry’s name doesn’t ring a bell, his work should — especially if you’re an NBA fan. Kirk is the guy behind those super-informative NBA shot maps over at Grantland. Goldsberry is a professor at Harvard, and works on utilizing the new SportVU system to track all kinds of shot data from around the NBA.
Blake Griffin shot chart courtesy of Grantland.com
He’s also a subject in a new book by Wired editor Mark McClusky. McClusky is the author of Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes–and What We Can Learn from Them. McClusky profiled Goldsberry in a video short for Wired. It’s a nice look behind the scenes of the ever-growing field of sports analytics and sports data journalism. Check it out below.
The NBA just agreed to a 4-year deal with fantasy website FanDuel according to both TechCrunch and ESPN. For daily fantasy players, this means FanDuel will be the exclusive website to get your hoops fix at. Already on the NBA Fantasy site you can be linked to FanDuel and expect the association to promote it on their apps as well as their streaming ads and commercials.
Currently FanDuel offers both free and pay-to-win leagues. The prizes for these range from cash to game tickets to merchandise. Now with the association in their pockets, FanDuel and the NBA, along with money from venture groups such as Shamrock Capital Advisors and NBC Sports Ventures, will be able to reach and attract even more customers.The growth in the daily fantasy industry is on a massive rise, as FanDuel has increased by 650,000 paying players in the past three months after never before having even a third of that many in a single quarter. FanDuel claims they project to make approximately $600 million in entry fees this calendar year while handing back $540 million in prizes.
While this is new territory for the NBA as a whole, five teams had prior deals with FanDuel; the Brooklyn Nets, New York Knicks, Orlando Magic, Dallas Mavericks and Chicago Bulls. The move also includes NBA league executive Sal La Rocca as a FanDuel board member, further strengthening the ties between the two entities.
With competitor DraftKings snapping up the NHL, this deal makes sense for FanDuel. Given the massive interest and ease of use for daily fantasy leagues, it appears as though both FanDuel and DraftKings will the main entities of daily leagues going forward. With both sides throwing around millions of dollars, the money is driving even more attention to fantasy sports.
