Research

Performance math: Sports analytics growing field

The burgeoning field of analytics was made famous by the book and movie, “Moneyball,” which showed how the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox gained a significant advantage over other baseball teams in the early-to-mid 2000s by their use of statistical formulas. Today, virtually every major sports organization uses analytics throughout its business. At a recent symposium sponsored by the W. P. Carey School’s Sports Business Association, the numbers professionals talked about the ways analytics is building performance – both on the court and in the stadium.

2014-05-01

In 2010, the Phoenix Suns were trying to figure out a winning formula in an up-and-down season. At the time, Amin Elhassan, a W. P. Carey School of Business graduate, had been working for the Phoenix Suns in a variety of capacities, including analytics — a growing field in the sports industry. Staffers with math backgrounds analyzed objective data and made suggestions to coaches on how to improve their team's chances of winning.

Elhassan had noticed a distinct trend: The Suns sagged when they put Amare' Stoudemire and Channing Frye together on the floor for long stretches. “Neither was really good defensively, and neither was really a good rebounder,” Elhassan recalled.

The numbers told Elhassan and his colleagues that when the Suns inserted Robin Lopez — their defensive-minded, second-year center — on the front line with either player, the Suns played considerably better.

But Lopez had played inconsistently at times, had been injured at others, so the coaches “didn't have a lot of confidence” in the suggestion, Elhassan said. “We kept pushing it, kept pushing it. Finally they put him (Lopez) in the starting lineup.”

The Suns began to surge.

The combinations of players clicked to the point where the Suns became the NBA's surprise team. They made a dramatic run to the Western Conference Finals and nearly made it all the way to the NBA Finals.

“That was cool ... because I could really point to ... the numbers we showed.”

Elhassan, who now writes for ESPN, was among the panelists who spoke on analytics at a symposium sponsored by W. P. Carey School’s Sports Business Association

Winning formula

Analytics were made famous by the book and movie, Moneyball, which showed how the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox gained a significant advantage over other baseball teams in the early-to-mid 2000s by their use of statistical formulas.

The people who figured out these formulas didn't necessarily have a sports background, but they certainly could crunch numbers.

“A lot of times, we have analytics people who don't understand the basketball side and we have basketball people who don't understand analytics,” said Elhassan who also scouted for the Suns and worked in the team's video room. “My goal is to bring those things together.”

More recently, the field's importance to the sports industry was re-emphasized when ESPN hired analytics expert Nate Silver last year. Working in the political sphere for the New York Times, Silver had correctly predicted the depth and breadth of President Obama's re-election win while many pollsters were calling the 2012 presidential race a virtual dead heat.

The importance of analytics can be found in virtually every big-time sports operation. For example, analytics experts track the tendencies of referees for the NBA. Now, every NBA arena has six high-performance cameras installed high over the courts that track the movements of players.

The new sports stats

“We are collecting all the data during every single game for the NBA,” said another panelist, Paul Robbins, director of elite performance at STATS, LLC, which runs the cameras.

In the past Robbins worked at Athletes' Performance Institute (now called EXOS), a high-end training center formerly located just off the eastern edge of ASU's campus. He worked with famous pro athletes — and aspiring ones — and, “The best thing I had was a heartrate monitor.”

Now working with NBA teams, he has GPS equipment, cameras and instruments that measure acceleration. As for those cameras high up in NBA arenas, “They recognize the players by their jersey colors and number,” Robbins said.

The end result is that Robbins knows exactly how far every player runs. “And then if I know the distance, I know the time, then I can look at speeds.”

The cameras also record dribbles, passes and rebounds: “It goes into much more detail than just the number; it's actually where they're at, who's next to them. Is it a contested rebound? Who's guarding them? How many dribbles? You can take five dribbles, then you shoot with your right hand; what is your percentage as opposed to the left hand? And who is guarding you. It's really detailed.”

Every player probably runs about the same distance in one game as another, so that's not a big deal, Robbins figures. What's important to him is “how fast you’ve gone, how many accelerations and how many decelerations. What kind of leg fatigue does an athlete experience over time? What’s the overall load? How about speed, distance and body weight and pounding on that body? How much pounding can they handle for that week?”

All of this is designed to keep the players on the court or field.

“That's where the real money is: injury prevention,” he said. “That's the direction that we're really going in — that is, with the teams that actually listen to us.”

Athletes cost teams millions of dollars. If an analyst can save teams money by studying the way players play, “then they start listening,” Robbins added. All of this knowledge is so new that, “Teams really don't know what they're doing at this point,” he said.

But they are starting to listen. One of the teams that made it to the playoffs last year adjusted playing time based off of Robbins’ data. “There are teams that are open to it and get it,” he said.

Robbins' firm is now branching into the National Football League and National Hockey League.

Business in the stadium

The growing analytics field also is important for the business side of the franchise, which collects valuable data when fans swipe cards at team shops and concessions stands. For the teams, discovering the information residing in that data is the same challenge that other businesses face.

Joel McFadden, COO of Fan Interactive Marketing, who previously worked for the Arizona Diamondbacks, describes the new opportunities this way: “We have all this data: now how do we act on it? What can we do to make actionable decisions around it?”

In both the sports and general entertainment industries, people in McFadden's business are looking to better target audiences.

“How do we profile these folks? Rather than emailing everybody and their sister about a Billy Joel concert, for example, let's just email those folks who we think will buy Billy Joel because they bought similar things in the past,” McFadden said.

Though teams are getting smart about analytics, “The sports world is ... still very much behind a lot of the other industries that are out there,” particularly some consumer products and the gaming industry, McFadden said.

“The casinos know how much you are going to spend when you are thinking about going to Las Vegas. Sports teams are catching up but they're not where a lot of other companies are,” he said.

Fan portrait

Even fans themselves are being analyzed. Teams are trying to figure out how to compete with TV, as fans increasingly enjoy staying at home to watch sports on huge flat-screens, but at the same time, ESPN is looking for ways to keep those sports viewers on the couch.

Panelist Stefanie Francis, a W. P. Carey graduate who is the co-founder and managing director of Navigate Research, worked on a project for ESPN that took her into fans' homes to watch them view football on TV.

“ESPN wanted to understand how fans are changing their behavior in their living rooms,” she said. “At one key moment, with one particular participant, he was in five different fantasy leagues. He spent 90 percent of his time on his laptop or a combination of all these things.”

“In his mind, that fan was watching football, but he was actually not watching football,” Francis said. When he realized what he was doing, she said, the fan said “How sad that I wasn’t watching the game.”

For business analytics professionals, communications skills are important, as is the need to read and stay in touch with other experts. Francis said that to make informational research “exciting, usable and interesting ... it takes someone who can communicate it, which is a rare person to find.”

If, for example, the numbers reveal that a player is shooting too much or from the wrong areas of the court, the analytics expert then must relay the information to the general manager, the coach and/or the player. Her goal is to help the player understand the unsuccessful playing patterns that the data uncovers so that he can improve. “I have to frame it in a certain way,” Elhassan said.

“That's something that a lot of young analysts and people who fiddle with numbers don't really get,” she added. “You have to know how to relay what you’ve learned in a way that they can understand. We can overwhelm people. But the question is, how can I get you to understand and do the behavior that I want?”

Elhassen says she is constantly in research mode: reading, talking, engaging on line and and listening. “You never know when you’re going to find a source of incredible information that can help you along. There's no such thing as bad information as long as it's accurate. It's the way you interpret it.”

What's so striking about analytics in sports is it's still in its infancy. Ten years ago, no one in the United States was using data in sports, and in Europe, soccer teams were just beginning to experiment with it. The field is changing constantly.

“I can't even imagine what it will be even two years from now,” Robbins said. Elhassan predicts that the volume of information will rise, opening up opportunities in data interpretation, especially for young professionals.

Robbins told students attending the panel discussion that few people are working in the field today compared to what the future holds. “For you, this is huge. This is all brand new.”

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