The NBA Is Wisely Opening Up Its SportVU Data To Fans And Media Outlets

Arturo Martinez

        The article that I have chosen to discuss talks about the NBA allowing media outlets (examples: EPSN, TNT, NBATV) and its fans to have access to data collected by STATS LLC.  STATS LLC uses it SPORT UV technology to capture every player movement using a system of cameras in each arena, which has been in use in the league since 2013 for every game.  The data collected has been used by teams to monitor their players, scouting, and define workout plans (Barker).

        Three points I would like to emphasize concerning this article are how media outlets can use the data, how the data can benefit fans, and how NBA benefits by making this data public.  Currently, media outlets such as the ESPN and TNT use their own technology to gather data from games to provide an analysis.  By having access to the data collected by STATS LLC, which is done in real time, then these media outlets could provide a better analysis of the game.  Thus, by improving the analysis of the game, it would show the fans that they are trying to provide the best possible analysis to them and also, allowing a casual fan to better understand the game by breaking down, explaining certain situations in a game.  However, for a die-hard fan who engages in fantasy sports, the access to this set of data could potentially lead to making a good amount of money from fantasy leagues.  Before this access to this information fans would, more often that not, pick up players according to who they thought were the best.  However, with this new data, a fan can now see exactly what a player does in a game and how much variations there are in a player’s performance from game to game.  Instead of just picking who they think are the best, now fans will be able to pick players who are actually performing well, even if they’re players that they have never heard of!  Doing so would definitely aid in the choosing of players, which in turn gives fans a better chance at winning fantasy leagues and some money.  This move could also lead to an improvement in fan loyalty that would benefit the NBA by creating a larger fan base; as of 2015 the NBA now broadcasts in 215 countries (Barker)..  By creating an ever larger following, there will be obvious benefits in terms of revenue for the league that can come in the form of ticket or merchandise sales.

Three things I felt that the article tended to overlook is explaining how the data collected   

is stored, how to and if it is easy/hard to access the data, and how teams feel about the data of their players now being publicly available.  There has to be hundreds of gigabytes stored per game and there needs to be a system in place to organize that data, which would be interesting to know how that is done.