Wilson, SportIQ Team Up to Produce “Pro-Quality” Smart Basketball

Look close at Wilson’s Wx “connected basketball,” and it’s hard to tell what’s so different about it until you spot the Bluetooth logo by the inflation valve.

“That is not something we usually deal with,” Wilson’s Vice President of Innovation Bob Thurman chuckled.

The ball was presented, along with an accompanying mobile app, at last month’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Wilson developed the basketball in partnership with SportIQ, a Finnish company whose player tracking solution combines wearable sensors with synchronized video to help coaches analyze their teams’ performance.

When asked, SportIQ CEO Harri Hohteri (pictured above) was reluctant to talk about the “secret sauce” behind his company’s basketball. But he was quick to differentiate it from other smart sensor basketballs like 94Fifty’s.

“[The 94Fifty ball] was designed around shooting mechanics as a training tool,” Hohteri said. “But the first thing for us is the consumer side of things. We wanted to develop a professional-quality basketball.”

Hohteri, who played four professional seasons in Finland’s Korisliiga, insisted the feel of the basketball was of the utmost importance to players. “I can’t tell the difference between this and a game ball,” he said.

The quality of the basketball is further underscored by SportIQ’s partnership with the Korisliiga. For the third straight season, Finnish players are wearing the company’s sensors (and using its basketball) in league games. The data is used to automatically tag events in a synchronized video that Hohteri says coaches are using to track the efficiency of their offensive sets. And because it relies on sensors, the system doesn’t need the extensive camera setup used by STATS’ SportVU tracking system.

“It’s about doing things more efficiently,” Hohteri said. “That’s the whole idea. We can do the whole thing in real time with less manpower than teams are using now.”

But for those of us who aren’t running a professional basketball league, Wilson’s connected basketball is launching this year. The demo at the conference included a smartphone app (projected onto a television) that showed players their accuracy from various distances on the floor. A machine learning algorithm in the app detects makes and misses without the need for an additional sensor attached to the net, unique among smart basketball systems. Each distance stripe was color-coded, according to the percentage of shots made from anywhere in that arc.

SportIQ’s partnership with Wilson started in August 2012, when SportIQ first began its relationship with Finnish basketball. Because Wilson is the official basketball of the league, Hohteri approached Wilson’s innovations department about developing a smart basketball.

“At the same time, our business director was asking us for a way to measure makes and misses in the driveway to keep kids in the game,” Thurman said. “So we agreed that we would help engage them on tracking the basketball, and they would help us with this make/miss aspect.”

Thurman hopes the partnership between their companies will combine SportIQ’s intelligence with Wilson’s broad user base to “gamify” practice and inspire the next generation of basketball players.

“We want to activate 12-15 year old kids, to get them off the video games, and get them back in the park, to be more active,” Thurman said.