NBA Draft Combine goes virtual with HomeCourt
Tom Ryan, the Basketball Technology and Innovation lead at the NBA League Office, has seen firsthand the league’s success during its restart at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida.
His typical job is to lead the R&D arm of League Operations, which focuses on advancing the game through cutting-edge initiatives, programs, and partnerships. However, to help restart the 2019–20 season in Orlando, the scope of his role extended into general health technology to help keep players and staff safe on the NBA’s campus. The group has also focused on exploring new technology and innovations to support other NBA events and initiatives during the pandemic, including the pre-Draft process.
“Our department’s goal is to continue innovating the on-court product and implement cutting-edge technologies to improve priority areas like talent identification, player health, and officiating ”
Under normal circumstances, prospects and team executives would gather together in Chicago for the annual NBA Draft Combine, an event that features three days of medical exams, anthropometric measurements, strength and agility testing, on-court shooting drills, 5 vs. 5 scrimmages, and interviews. But, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year has been anything but ordinary.
“The draft combine has been largely the same for the past decade,” Ryan said, but the pandemic has acted as an impetus for the NBA to rethink how it holds large events given the restrictions within the country.
The league needed somewhere to share and store data, videos, and other relevant information on the potential draftees.
As Ryan put it, the NBA “had two problems we were trying to solve for, so we took the event from its foundation and said to teams, ‘if we are not able to do the standard pre-Draft workouts, both in your local market and in Chicago, tell us what data points are most essential to your evaluation process.’”
The feedback Ryan and his team received consisted of using “this opportunity as a way to get more data,” and as luck would have it, the NBA already had the perfect partner.
In Mid-July of 2019, the NBA announced a “first-of-its-kind strategic partnership with NEX Team’s HomeCourt app.”
“I think our strategic partnership with HomeCourt was essential for navigating through the pandemic.”
HomeCourt is one of the fastest-growing apps since launching in 2018. It is a mobile training application that features tools like shot accuracy, performance metrics, ball tracking, and other advanced machine learning techniques to track players’ progress over time.
NBA President Team Marketing & Business Operations and Chief Innovation Officer Amy Brooks explained, “NBA teams and players have already found HomeCourt to be an important training platform. HomeCourt is not only an engaging channel for youth basketball players but will also be a valuable tool for the NBA to identify talent globally.”
David Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of NEX Team, said, “Together, we look forward to designing innovative experiences that bring together the digital and physical worlds that will build community and engage basketball players.”
“This application for Draft Combine is an evolution of the NBA Global Scout platform that we launched with HomeCourt in February 2020.”
The NBA has previously partnered on two other projects, HotShot and NBA Global Scout.
Ryan said, “we’ve gone through a lot of different iterations, both on the fan engagement side with HotShot that led into an in-person event at NBA All-Star 2020; to NBA Global Scout, our ambitious talent identification project that aims to find the next great international player by providing more opportunities for elite basketball players from around the world to be discovered and evaluated.”
Fast forward, and HomeCourt is already stepping up to the plate once more.
“Our goal on the talent discovery initiative with HomeCourt is to build the “LinkedIn for global basketball”
On September 23, the NBA announced that this year’s Draft Combine “has been reformatted to be conducted both in NBA team markets and virtually, taking place in phases beginning September 28 and continuing through early to mid-November.”
The motivation for both sides to come together and find a way to bring innovation to the Combine comes from the top-down; Ryan said, “our Governors are some of the most connected and forward-thinking people, and they’re always pushing us to think differently about every problem that we see on the business side, the basketball side, how we engage with our fans, all those things.”
The NBA moved quickly to evaluate and re-configure the annual Draft Combine, starting the process “in March when we opted to suspend our season,” Ryan said.
Though the Combine’s setup has remained the same for several years, the NBA had a chance to re-think and reengineer what it looked like this time around.
While teams were getting to see the players they wanted to, there was an opportunity to streamline the processes. As Ryan put it, “I think a major operational issue in the past has been trying to put 60–70 athletes through a comprehensive assessment on just three courts during a tight timeframe.”
Due to COVID-19, the league needed to come up with something brand new. “HomeCourt worked with us to define a product that would both get us the right volume of shots, the right type of shots…in March, we weren’t sure if the pre-Draft process was going to take place in 60–70 local markets or a single facility in Chicago,” Ryan said.
There was a real need to create something flexible enough to work regardless of where the players worked out. Ryan mentioned that the ability to use HomeCourt wherever and whenever was critical, “All they need is an iPad or an iPhone, and they can go through the workout.”
Ryan said teams would be able to get more information under these new circumstances, “the data from this year’s shooting workouts is going to be somewhat new to teams…they typically don’t get this volume of shots from this many prospects in a given year.”
“They’ve been a great partner and at every level of the basketball pyramid for the NBA — from grassroots to elite.”
As the official release from the NBA says, “Players will also take part in an individual on-court program consisting of strength and agility testing, anthropometric measurements, shooting drills and a “Pro Day” video, all conducted in October at the NBA team facility nearest to a player’s home or interim residence.”
Knowing that the technology would be readily available to anyone helped lead them to a structure that would allow players to hold their own “Pro Day” events across the country. Rather than having the teams or personal trainers create individual programs, there is now a ready-made template for all prospects to follow.
This change might not be a one-time thing either; Ryan said, “we’re going to closely evaluate and get feedback from teams and players on this year’s format, intending to potentially use this technology in future years for the NBA, WNBA, G League, and other properties.”
It is also something that the league plans to share with all global basketball players. Ryan said they are excited to see how youth and other non-NBA players will use what they’ve created.
“We hope to use the technology developed for the 2020 Draft Combine, in addition to other tools we’ve built with HomeCourt, to help identify and evaluate elite youth basketball players around the globe.”
“We can give players, parents, and coaches the tools to create a robust basketball resume that shows biographical information, anthropometric data, strength & agility data, game footage, stats, etc. On top of that, with HomeCourt’s technology, you’re also able to show the world your work ethic and quantify how you’ve improved over time. The NBA and HomeCourt are both excited about this vision and think it will be an invaluable platform for all athletes in the future,” Ryan said.
In the end, they see their partnership with HomeCourt as a tool for teams across the world to find talent, “We need all stakeholders in the basketball ecosystem — from federations to leagues to clubs/teams — to be looking at HomeCourt profiles and running talent searches through HomeCourt to find the next player for their team.”
With the NBA having basketball development academies in Australia, China, India, Mexico, and Senegal as potential destinations for elite high school-aged international players, “In the very near future, we’re going to be able to tell some cool stories about how the NBA was able to identify and evaluate a prospect purely through HomeCourt, which led to a lifechanging opportunity for that individual.”
