The NBA is Bringing Video Clips For All Stats

For those who look at the box score during or after games when they couldn't watch the game live, the only thing given to you was numbers. If one was to go to NBA.com or ESPN.com, they could watch the highlights of the game for their viewing pleasure. The NBA has taken it to a whole new level recently.

The National Basketball Association is now linking box scores and videos together, so now the average viewer can watch the video for every single play that occurs during the game. Want to re-watch the Nets causing a turnover in the second quarter? It's there. Enjoy watching Brook Lopez using his finesse around the rim on any given play? It's there. Studying players and want to see if there's any pattern in the Nets turnovers? Every single turnover is there.

The NBA wasn't playing when they wanted to create a statistical movement. Ira Boudway of Businessweek reported the news.

“We believe this is the first time video of every play of every game has been married to the statistics,” Ken DeGennaro, the NBA’s vice president for operations and technology.

While this may not appeal to everyone, it will provide a means of analysts or the casual viewer to go back and rewatch a certain play that they felt was important but not highlight-reel worthy. With this influx of available data, the NBA supplying users with more information that it can handle.

Replays for every game will be available 45 minutes after the end of the game on the NBA Stats page. Boudway illustrates briefly the business incentives for the NBA for allowing all of this to come out.

The short answer is because it can. While the league sells exclusive live video rights to its media partners, it owns every game once it’s over. This is just another way to make use of the vast archive, and adding the clips to the stats is not as heavy a lift as it would have been 10 years ago. In July 2012, the league announced a marketing partnership with enterprise software maker SAP (SAP), which led to the launch in February of the NBA’s massive new stats site. Earlier this month the NBA added player-tracking data. Video box scores are the latest addition in the ongoing bid to build the most exhaustive and user-friendly statistical archive in sports. 

Producing online entertainment, in other words, now takes less time than it does to consume it. And the more inventory you have, the more advertising you can sell. The league says preroll ads will run before replays beginning on day one; it doesn’t specify how long and how often. For some fans, the archive will be a way to build their own highlight show with all the plays they want to see in their entirety. DeGennaro calls the replays a “complement” to other highlights and says they provide “the visual story behind our statistics.”

The NBA, it appears, has tons of data that it would like to make available to the public. While some may think this is useless, others will spend hours within this new realm of data the NBA has opened up.
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