The scorer's table, courtside at Staples Center.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)LOS ANGELES--Never mind the nail-biting lead changes down the stretch, or the dazzling display put on by league MVP Kobe Bryant here at Game 3 of the NBA Finals.
Try also to forget Jack Nicholson holding court from his usual spot at Staples Center. Shrug off the fact that Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, David Beckham, and Hugh Hefner are all sitting a few feet away. One of the biggest stars in Los Angeles Tuesday night stayed quietly out of sight.
Logging the mind-boggling amount of statistics produced in a single National Basketball Association game is an intense undertaking. And the league has fine-tuned a tech setup to get the job done. A private network, a series of tablet PCs, and a precision PC-powered timing system have to work perfectly in concert to collect, process, and deliver game details posthaste.
Tablet PCs are used to input the more than 500 statistical events in a single NBA game.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)And in the case of the finals, technology partner Lenovo has used both teams' statistics to predict the future. Here at Staples Center, before Game 3 between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, I'm told that a technology called the Lenovo Stat has already predicted the winner of the series.
With a plus-minus statistic developed by the PC maker, the Stat determines the best possible five-player combination for each team, and it rates them according to their output and effect on their team. The Lenovo Stat, featured on NBA.com, is also distributed to coaches and players.
In the playoffs, the Boston Celtics have a leading rating of +79, the Lakers are right behind, at +66. We'll see what happens, but so far, the series is led by Boston, 2 games to 1, after the Lakers won Tuesday night (to this LA girl's supreme delight), 87 to 81.
But back to the technology. Before tip-off, I got a look at who and what is behind producing the incredibly detailed and specific real-time stats for a game.
Here is one of the monitors that displays the statistics in real-time.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)"Stats are the language of our sport--or any sport, really," said Steve Hellmuth, NBA executive vice president of operations and technology. That is why the NBA logs statistics of its games in exhaustive detail. In real time, they are processed and fed to media outlets covering the game.
Ensuring that no potential stats go unlogged during the nearly 500 possessions of a single game requires a technical coordinator, a play spotter, and two people tasked with stat input.
Recorded plays include tipped passes, missed shots, illegal picks, charging fouls, and, of course, points scored, rebounds, and assists. In 1,300 regular-season NBA games, that amounts to more than 675,000 statistical events logged, according to Lenovo. At all 29 NBA arenas, the data input specialists use a no-frills ThinkPad X61 tablet PC.
Behind the NBA's Precision Time system is a ThinkPad that parses the clock's stops and starts.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)The data is instantly sent to the scoreboards plastered all around the court, the with related graphics appearing on the televised broadcast of the game, NBA.com, as well as scores of monitors scattered about the arena at press tables and announcer booths.
The information is also sent over the NBA's private network to Secaucus, N.J., where a host of inputters log metadata related to game highlights. These contribute to the league's digital-video archive, searchable by players, coaches, TV analysts, and even referees looking for trends and details from the video footage, according to Hellmuth, who has had a hand in developing the high-tech statistics-gathering processes for both the NBA and Major League Baseball.
The NBA's also taken to perfecting the timing of the game with special computers. Down at the scorer's table, closer on the edge of the court, is a ThinkPad, which acts as a "parser." It records every time the game clock is stopped and started again.
The belt pack worn by NBA referees signals when to stop and start the clock. It's held by its inventor, Michael Costabile.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)It's synched up with a remote unit the referees wear on their belts. Every time one of them blows their whistle, the sound sends a signal to the belt unit, which tells the clock to stop and start. The system, used by most college sports arenas as well, was invented by Michael Costabile, president of Precision Time.
The league uses this method because it's the least error-prone. "A human takes two-tenths of a second" to stop the clock after hearing the referee's whistle, said Hellmuth. "That's why we say 'a game is 48 minutes long, more or less'--because there are humans on every side of it."
Technology and new media made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
Why would the founder of Broadcast.com and the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks force bloggers into a digital ghetto by limiting their access to his basketball team? Isn't he a card-carrying member of the digerati?
Mark Cuban wants bloggers out of locker room
(Credit: Golden State Warriors blog)By banning bloggers from the Maverick's locker room, that's what he's doing, according to several journalism poobahs, including the Society of Professional Journalists.
The kerfuffle allegedly began when Tim MacMahon, who blogs for the Dallas Morning News, wrote something to the effect that the Mavs needed a new coach. On the same day the story was published, Cuban bounced MacMahon from the locker room. Days later, the team issued a new policy. No one who writes full-time for the Web is allowed in the Mav's locker room.
The Mavericks said the decision was made because there's too little space in the locker room to accommodate everyone. In an e-mail to CNET News.com, Cuban explained his view.
"The issue is that anyone can be a blogger. In about 10 seconds," Cuban wrote. "I have to make some sort of judgment on who should qualify for access. I'm not prepared to make that judgment yet. I haven't decided what the parameters will be."
He has a point. The Internet enables anyone to blog and to call themselves a blogger. If the Mavericks handed out press credentials to anyone calling themselves a blogger, press row would fill half of the American Airlines' Center, where the team plays.
But by limiting access to bloggers, Cuban is discriminating against a form of journalism that is practiced by every major publication in the country and one which is growing in influence every day. Cuban argues that he's not trying to pick on bloggers as a group.
"Bloggers can be journalists," he said. "Bloggers can have journalistic standards. However, not all do... The one thing I know for sure is that because someone is a blogger for a big company, doesn't make him or her "better" or more qualified blogger."
As a former sportswriter, I've covered Cuban for both sports and technology stories. He is one of the most accessible team owners and technology heavyweights there is. He answers e-mails at all hours and about all subjects. He doesn't duck anyone. But in this situation, it looks like MacMahon's story ticked him off and he saw a way to weed out journalists he doesn't like.
At the same time he's unfairly tarnishing blogging's image.
He has to know if he slammed the door on superstar columnists like Michael Wilbon or Mitch Albom, their employers, The Washington Post or Detroit Free Press wouldn't put up with it. Just ask Al Davis, owner of the NFL's Oakland Raiders, who tried to ban a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles years ago. The major papers and TV stations in town threatened to stop covering the team and Davis soon backed down.
Cuban, as a friend to new media and technology and someone who I think tries to be fair to reporters, should rescind his blogger policy.Bloggers aren't going away.
Come on Mark, do you really want to be compared to Al Davis?
Down the lane, into the future
(Credit: NBA)Expensive sports rights are a major cost for the United States television industry. Sports also brings huge ad revenue and a male audience that is much prized by advertisers because it's so elusive.
Now the NBA has signed new TV deals that run nearly a decade. This time the buyers get significant rights to Internet distribution of games, highlights and related content. Clearly, this is just another step toward the Internet becoming a full-fledged alternative to typical TV distribution. An ESPN executive said its Web site had a million unique visitors daily during the NBA playoffs earlier this year.
Is this a big deal? Well, it's more than $7 billion dollars worth. That's what Disney and Time Warner are paying for an additional eight years of NBA games. There is no direct allocation of costs between TV and online. Games will be both live and on demand via the various Web sites involved.
Two things are significant. Exclusive sports content like the NBA will help the Internet grow beyond its paltry 5.5% of all American ad dollars. Secondly: it shows the NBA embracing the new technologies, not resisting. Major League Baseball is going after the Slingbox, for example. Another sport that's keeping up with the times: the NHL has cut a deal with the Slingers.
One last pertinent point, the NBA itself will be streaming some games exclusively from its Web site and keeping that ad revenue. So a question regarding the future of sports online: who gets the money advertisers will gladly spend? Well, that's still a jump ball.
Lately, I've been getting into basketball. I know what you're going to say. That I'm jumping on the bandwagon. (I am.) It all started because of a man, of course.
No, not Steve Nash. It's because of a man who loves Steve Nash. He hooked me with the players' back stories, his impassioned declarations about the grace of the game and, more to the point, the way he distinctly pronounces each player's name.
So I started following the Phoenix Suns and then, naturally, my hometown team: the Golden State Warriors. (The last time I attended a Warriors game was in the '80s. I can't remember the year exactly, but it's likely I was still wearing braces, still getting my hair permed and still watching Magnum P.I.)
It seems that just about everyone is suddenly watching the Warriors again. The New York Times reported Monday that the NBA has started offering video downloads of playoff games for $2.99--free of advertising and timeouts. Sales so far have been described as "promising." And guess whose games are among the most popular? That's right, the series that had the No. 8 seed (Golden State) beating the No. 1 seed (some team from Dallas owned by some dude who made a lot of money from the Internet).
So far, only playoff games from this season and last season are available, according to the Times. A series costs $12.99, while all the playoff games can be had for $79.99. The National Basketball Association said it eventually plans to offer older games--there are some 40,000 games on tape in its archive.
"We're getting slowly to our older games, but we'll be focused 100 percent on that this summer," Steve Hellmuth, an NBA senior vice president, told the Times. "We view this as a mission we have to execute for the fans," he said. "The revenue side of it comes second."
Yes, for the fans. I'm just not sure I want to see Nash knock heads with Tony Parker again. Six stitches!
All right, so maybe the mid-season acquisition of Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington had more to do with the Bay Area's Golden State Warriors making the playoffs Wednesday night for the first time in 12 years.
But since we made fun of the team's fortunes in this space last fall, we believe it's only fair to point out that the success comes after a 10-year naming-rights deal inked by software powerhouse Oracle. The company's name and logo adorn the arena in Oakland, and will get some prime-time air during the opening round of the NBA playoffs, when the Warriors take on the league's best team, the Dallas Mavericks.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison has a long history with the sporting world, and most followers of the company would agree that this is a man who doesn't like to lose. Sure, the Warriors sneaked into the playoffs as the Western Conference's eighth and final seed, but this has been a snake-bitten team for so many frustrating years. And it swept the season series from Mark Cuban's Mavericks, who otherwise dominated the league. Given Ellison's penchant for acquisitions, maybe that strategy rubbed off on the team, which will try to become only the third eighth seed to topple a No. 1 seed.
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