‘An exciting next few years’: will Hawk-Eye spark an NBA data revolution?

A new partnership with Hawk-Eye is teasing a tantalizing near-future for data in the NBA - as long as teams and the league can play nice with each other long enough to get there

The mood was tense and frustrated on an NBA-wide team analytics call in late July.

The call was ostensibly meant to discuss all the exciting features and workflows of the NBA's new partnership with Hawk-Eye Innovations, a company known for its motion capture work across several sports. Quickly, though, team analytics staffers realized a big problem: Many of the building blocks of the motion tracking system previously used by the league, which teams have been relying on for everything from scouting and analysis to coaching game-plans for most of a decade, were missing entirely.