The NBA has become more and more analytics-driven, and the Nets have gone all-in on technology as much as anybody.
Just watching one of their games drives that point home: players on the bench study their laptops, pass iPads from one to another and learn on the fly, not just from plays on the court, but also from analysis off it.
“These things are here to help us. So if you use analytics the right way, it absolutely is helpful,” Blake Griffin said. “I think we do do that. There’s a lot of information out there, but you have to find what’s most useful to you, to your team, and utilize it like that. So I’m definitely a fan of analytics.”
With the Nets, Griffin is using it in ways he never has before, and for a player who has been in the NBA for more than a decade, that’s saying something. There’s a saying in the league that proceeds him: KYP, or Know Your Personnel. The Nets are using STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to help their players do just that.
Griffin spoke virtually to about 1,000 students across the city at the recent NETSTEM Day, explaining to kids who are being taught about STEM through basketball-themed computer games how the professionals make use of similar technology.
Basketball is a game of angles, and the Nets use analytics to help players hone their use of them in getting to the basket on offense and cutting off drives on defense. But the work extends to real time, while games are going on. The Nets can get help self-correcting a bad shot or a botched play, thanks to interactive software.
“It can be anything from a play that we might’ve messed up or a play we just ran that we feel we can get something else on it,” Griffin said. “I’ll … watch my clips, just to see if I had a bad turnover, if I missed a shot. Or even if I made a shot, sometimes you just want to take a different look at it, because from a different perspective you can see things a little more clearly. Sometimes when you’re in the game and everything’s moving so quickly, you miss things.
“It’s great. What’s really cool is [coach Steve] Nash uses an iPad to draw up our plays. He has this software where each player has a little thing and you can move the ball around. Then once he does, he can hit play and then it’ll actually do it for him, so you can watch it on the screen. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. I thought it was pretty cool that all this technology is being used more in games in real time.”
The performance team monitors load management — how often players are on their feet, running and jumping. They have famously even monitored players’ urine, according to Joe Harris.
But the use of technology stretches to opposing players and future ones.
Glenn DuPaul, the Nets’ director of basketball analytics, spoke at NETSTEM Day about how his team provides analytics for the whole organization that’s used for both game plans and player acquisition.
“Around the draft, trade, free agency, when we’re looking to acquire a player, giving our scouts or general managers information on who we should target, who we should require, why we value them,” DuPaul said. “We also work closely with our coaches. We have a member of our team who sits on the bench during games.
“He works with them pregame, postgame, halftime, giving reports on our opponents as well as our own team … giving them all the information on [our foes] and their players, as well as building out different apps and websites for our organization to use. So when we have a scout out at the NCAA Tournament game he’s interacting with, with some of the stats we’ve built to input information on players that might someday become a Net.”