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How an Israeli Tech Startup Changed the NBA
SportVU turned an ordinary basketball game into an extraordinarily rich data set. Now meet the unlikely characters behind the making of the modern NBA.
By Ben Cohen / WALL STREET JOURNAL
Nov. 7, 2017
The unlikely characters behind the most crucial basketball innovation since the 3-point line had no reason to believe they would play important roles in the making of the modern NBA.
One was an esteemed physicist who always liked soccer more than basketball. One was a biomedical engineer who helped start a tech company days after leaving the military. And both were based in Israel.
Gal Oz and Miky Tamir invented a product called SportVU—as in a new way to view sports—that used high-resolution tracking cameras in the catwalks of NBA arenas to capture the precise movements of players thousands of times per minute.
SportVU turned an ordinary basketball game into a data set rich enough to alter behavior in this billion-dollar industry. It changed the way basketball teams make decisions, basketball players are valued and basketball fans understand the sport. It even changed the game itself.
But the league’s SportVU era is already over. Before this season, the NBA awarded its player-tracking contract to another company. SportVU was in and out in only seven years.
The lesson of SportVU, though, is how quickly and how radically the NBA became a different league in that time because of its data. At no point in history has the game transformed as much as it has in recent years. And that revolution was made possible by two unknown people living thousands of miles away.
Oz and Tamir met in a very Israeli manner. Oz happened to know someone from the army who was married to someone who had studied with someone who happened to know Tamir. It was only a matter of time before they built a tech company based on military expertise.
Tamir had a Ph.D. in physics and decades of experience working for Israeli nuclear research centers and defense contractors. He was one of his country’s brightest minds in the world of drones, satellites and computer imaging. And then he became an entrepreneur. He’d already started one company when he founded SportVU and hired Oz in 2005. Oz was looking for a job after 10 years in the Israel Defense Forces with a unit that specialized in what he called “visual-intelligence-related work—I cannot be more specific.”
The idea behind SportVU was ambitious. Their goal was to apply optical recognition techniques to sports by recording the precise coordinates of the action far below their cameras. But they had made enough progress after several years in soccer that Stats LLC, a sports-data company based in Chicago, wanted to acquire their business. The due diligence was assigned to a new employee named Brian Kopp. He flew to Tel Aviv for a tour of SportVU’s office. It didn’t take long: SportVU’s office was one room.
It was becoming clear that player-tracking technology was about to upend professional sports. Before it settled on SportVU, for example, Stats looked into a Swedish company that would later power Major League Baseball’s Statcast system. But in Israel’s booming tech scene, almost nobody was paying attention at the time. “Even the investors didn’t want to invest in these projects,” Tamir said.
Kopp’s job was to sell their idea to a major American sports league. He tried the NFL first. Soon there were 20 cameras on the roof of Lambeau Field tracking the Green Bay Packers. But another league would benefit from that experiment. When the NFL declined to make a deal, Kopp started pursuing one with the NBA.
Israel hadn’t produced any NBA players when the league’s top executives, including future commissioner Adam Silver, gathered in a hallway before Game 4 of the 2009 Finals for a glimpse at SportVU. Game 3 had been played under the eyes of its six cameras in the sky, and Kopp shared the results with his influential audience. “It was like the Pong version of videogames,” he said. “It was so simple. But people were blown away.”
It only added to SportVU’s exotic appeal that it was often said to be developed with “Israeli missile-tracking technology.” Except that was a myth. There was never any Israeli missile-tracking technology behind SportVU—though Oz says it wouldn’t have mattered even if there were.
“Tracking a missile is much easier than tracking a ball,” he said. “A missile is more predictable.”
The Dallas Mavericks were the first NBA team to commit, and owner Mark Cuban was so impressed that he asked how much it would cost to make sure no one else could buy SportVU access. Kopp wouldn’t consider the offer. He believed SportVU would be most valuable when every team had it. The competitive advantage wasn’t the raw data itself, he explained, but in how teams used the raw data.
Then he received another request from the Mavericks: “Mark Cuban would like you to track the referees.” Kopp was hesitant. He told the Mavs he didn’t want to risk inflaming his relationship with the league office by embracing a sensitive issue. The team’s response: “Mark Cuban would like you to track the referees.” SportVU began tracking the referees.
The Mavericks’ arena was equipped with SportVU’s cameras before the 2011 season. That season ended with the Mavericks winning the NBA championship.
“They changed the analytics game,” Cuban said in an email. “They had a huge impact.”
The first six NBA teams to adopt SportVU were the Mavericks, Spurs, Rockets, Thunder, Warriors and Celtics. They’re also the six NBA teams with the most wins over the last decade.
SportVU’s engineers were testing Boston’s arena one day, though, when they encountered an unexpected problem. Their cameras had trouble following the ball. The Celtics’ famous parquet court was too dark. As they planned for a meeting with the team’s brass, one Israeli engineer told Kopp he planned to ask the Celtics a question: Would they consider lightening the color of the floor? He might as well have wanted to paint the White House purple. Kopp made him promise not to bring it up.
Kopp then caught a break: the 2011 lockout. NBA teams suddenly had nothing better to do than listen to his wonky presentation. He figured the New York Knicks would bring a few people to a meeting that would last 30 minutes. Instead they brought their entire coaching staff and front office to a meeting that lasted three hours.
SportVU was so widely used by 2013 that the NBA decided to make a deal covering the entire league. And it was around this time when teams realized something peculiar: They had been playing basketball the wrong way.
This technology arrived at the exact moment the league was letting analytics influence strategy and style. The best teams were beginning to understand that all the information at their disposal suggested they should prioritize the game’s most efficient shots and launch more 3-pointers than anyone ever imagined. NBA executives say the enormous amount of data that SportVU only accelerated that process. Now they can barely recall the days before SportVU’s data even though they were only four years ago.
But Stats’s official contract with the NBA expired this season. While it’s still involved with the league, SportVU’s cameras were replaced by those from Second Spectrum, a Los Angeles startup founded by computer scientists who were professors in artificial intelligence when they started playing with SportVU’s data.
The people responsible for SportVU were no longer with the company by then. Tamir was gone after the Stats acquisition; Oz stayed for the NBA invasion. They later started another company together called Pixellot. Oz is still its chief technology officer; Tamir has since founded three more companies. And it’s partly because of them that Tel Aviv is such a hub of sports technology that Oz was in a bar last week and overheard a discussion of SportVU’s impact on the NBA. He walked over and joined the conversation.
Kopp left Stats and left SportVU behind. He’s now advising a startup, whose founders he met through Oz, that intrigued the NBA enough to approve a trial at this year’s Summer League. The company’s employees traveled to Las Vegas to meet with teams and watch their product in action.
It was a long way for them to fly. They were coming all the way from Israel.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
SportVU turned an ordinary basketball game into an extraordinarily rich data set. Now meet the unlikely characters behind the making of the modern NBA.
By Ben Cohen / WALL STREET JOURNAL
Nov. 7, 2017
The unlikely characters behind the most crucial basketball innovation since the 3-point line had no reason to believe they would play important roles in the making of the modern NBA.
One was an esteemed physicist who always liked soccer more than basketball. One was a biomedical engineer who helped start a tech company days after leaving the military. And both were based in Israel.
Gal Oz and Miky Tamir invented a product called SportVU—as in a new way to view sports—that used high-resolution tracking cameras in the catwalks of NBA arenas to capture the precise movements of players thousands of times per minute.
SportVU turned an ordinary basketball game into a data set rich enough to alter behavior in this billion-dollar industry. It changed the way basketball teams make decisions, basketball players are valued and basketball fans understand the sport. It even changed the game itself.
But the league’s SportVU era is already over. Before this season, the NBA awarded its player-tracking contract to another company. SportVU was in and out in only seven years.
The lesson of SportVU, though, is how quickly and how radically the NBA became a different league in that time because of its data. At no point in history has the game transformed as much as it has in recent years. And that revolution was made possible by two unknown people living thousands of miles away.
Oz and Tamir met in a very Israeli manner. Oz happened to know someone from the army who was married to someone who had studied with someone who happened to know Tamir. It was only a matter of time before they built a tech company based on military expertise.
Tamir had a Ph.D. in physics and decades of experience working for Israeli nuclear research centers and defense contractors. He was one of his country’s brightest minds in the world of drones, satellites and computer imaging. And then he became an entrepreneur. He’d already started one company when he founded SportVU and hired Oz in 2005. Oz was looking for a job after 10 years in the Israel Defense Forces with a unit that specialized in what he called “visual-intelligence-related work—I cannot be more specific.”
The idea behind SportVU was ambitious. Their goal was to apply optical recognition techniques to sports by recording the precise coordinates of the action far below their cameras. But they had made enough progress after several years in soccer that Stats LLC, a sports-data company based in Chicago, wanted to acquire their business. The due diligence was assigned to a new employee named Brian Kopp. He flew to Tel Aviv for a tour of SportVU’s office. It didn’t take long: SportVU’s office was one room.
It was becoming clear that player-tracking technology was about to upend professional sports. Before it settled on SportVU, for example, Stats looked into a Swedish company that would later power Major League Baseball’s Statcast system. But in Israel’s booming tech scene, almost nobody was paying attention at the time. “Even the investors didn’t want to invest in these projects,” Tamir said.
Kopp’s job was to sell their idea to a major American sports league. He tried the NFL first. Soon there were 20 cameras on the roof of Lambeau Field tracking the Green Bay Packers. But another league would benefit from that experiment. When the NFL declined to make a deal, Kopp started pursuing one with the NBA.
Israel hadn’t produced any NBA players when the league’s top executives, including future commissioner Adam Silver, gathered in a hallway before Game 4 of the 2009 Finals for a glimpse at SportVU. Game 3 had been played under the eyes of its six cameras in the sky, and Kopp shared the results with his influential audience. “It was like the Pong version of videogames,” he said. “It was so simple. But people were blown away.”
It only added to SportVU’s exotic appeal that it was often said to be developed with “Israeli missile-tracking technology.” Except that was a myth. There was never any Israeli missile-tracking technology behind SportVU—though Oz says it wouldn’t have mattered even if there were.
“Tracking a missile is much easier than tracking a ball,” he said. “A missile is more predictable.”
The Dallas Mavericks were the first NBA team to commit, and owner Mark Cuban was so impressed that he asked how much it would cost to make sure no one else could buy SportVU access. Kopp wouldn’t consider the offer. He believed SportVU would be most valuable when every team had it. The competitive advantage wasn’t the raw data itself, he explained, but in how teams used the raw data.
Then he received another request from the Mavericks: “Mark Cuban would like you to track the referees.” Kopp was hesitant. He told the Mavs he didn’t want to risk inflaming his relationship with the league office by embracing a sensitive issue. The team’s response: “Mark Cuban would like you to track the referees.” SportVU began tracking the referees.
The Mavericks’ arena was equipped with SportVU’s cameras before the 2011 season. That season ended with the Mavericks winning the NBA championship.
“They changed the analytics game,” Cuban said in an email. “They had a huge impact.”
The first six NBA teams to adopt SportVU were the Mavericks, Spurs, Rockets, Thunder, Warriors and Celtics. They’re also the six NBA teams with the most wins over the last decade.
SportVU’s engineers were testing Boston’s arena one day, though, when they encountered an unexpected problem. Their cameras had trouble following the ball. The Celtics’ famous parquet court was too dark. As they planned for a meeting with the team’s brass, one Israeli engineer told Kopp he planned to ask the Celtics a question: Would they consider lightening the color of the floor? He might as well have wanted to paint the White House purple. Kopp made him promise not to bring it up.
Kopp then caught a break: the 2011 lockout. NBA teams suddenly had nothing better to do than listen to his wonky presentation. He figured the New York Knicks would bring a few people to a meeting that would last 30 minutes. Instead they brought their entire coaching staff and front office to a meeting that lasted three hours.
SportVU was so widely used by 2013 that the NBA decided to make a deal covering the entire league. And it was around this time when teams realized something peculiar: They had been playing basketball the wrong way.
This technology arrived at the exact moment the league was letting analytics influence strategy and style. The best teams were beginning to understand that all the information at their disposal suggested they should prioritize the game’s most efficient shots and launch more 3-pointers than anyone ever imagined. NBA executives say the enormous amount of data that SportVU only accelerated that process. Now they can barely recall the days before SportVU’s data even though they were only four years ago.
But Stats’s official contract with the NBA expired this season. While it’s still involved with the league, SportVU’s cameras were replaced by those from Second Spectrum, a Los Angeles startup founded by computer scientists who were professors in artificial intelligence when they started playing with SportVU’s data.
The people responsible for SportVU were no longer with the company by then. Tamir was gone after the Stats acquisition; Oz stayed for the NBA invasion. They later started another company together called Pixellot. Oz is still its chief technology officer; Tamir has since founded three more companies. And it’s partly because of them that Tel Aviv is such a hub of sports technology that Oz was in a bar last week and overheard a discussion of SportVU’s impact on the NBA. He walked over and joined the conversation.
Kopp left Stats and left SportVU behind. He’s now advising a startup, whose founders he met through Oz, that intrigued the NBA enough to approve a trial at this year’s Summer League. The company’s employees traveled to Las Vegas to meet with teams and watch their product in action.
It was a long way for them to fly. They were coming all the way from Israel.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com