NBA and Wearable Tech Revolutionize Basketball

Particularly since the recent addition of Adam Silver as the NBA’s newest commissioner, the NBA has begun a heavy investment of time and effort into utilizing new technologies. In this world of analytics and data, players’ performance comes down to statistics and figures, and wearable tech is the next step to maximizing that.

This explosion of tech into the NBA has even started before last season, and continues to occur across the country in nearly every team. For example, every team installed sets of six military-grade cameras (supplied by SportVU and Catapult) in their arenas to record each player’s x and y coordinates throughout a game, giving full accountability to where a player is positioned at all times.

But court-side cameras are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to analytical control over the players, and that comes down to a fundamental philosophy of the new age of competitive sports: what happens off the court affects what happens on the court. And now with technology able to determine what happens off the court and translate that into meaningful data, teams plan on using any means that they can to ensure they are the best in every way.

Andre Iguodala uses Jawbone’s UP fitness tracker to monitor his sleep schedule to ensure he’s getting the most out of his sleep schedule. The Dallas Mavericks employ multiple biometric tests to ensure maximal health and diet. These are just a few baseline examples of the beginnings of what the NBA is beginning to use across the board. But with the added knowledge comes a precarious line of players being reduced to sets of data, becoming nothing more than lab rats. As recent Miami Heat retiree Shane Battier puts it “big data is scary because you don’t know where it’s going and who’s seen it.”

For more information on the relationship between tech and the NBA, check out the full story on ESPN.

Image Source: Jason Miller/Getty Images.

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