Every Final Four team this weekend received reconnaissance reports from a data company that is telling them… how to beat each other. Synergy, the AI-powered basketball analytics lab that was acquired by Sportradar two years ago, has evolved into such a training resource that every men’s and women’s show subscribes to its watch service just for the nuances and volume of it all.
A breakdown of every college team throughout the season? This is available. What plays did the team play on each possession? Available. Who passed the ball to whom and then to whom and then to whom? Available. Who kicked the ball and where? Available. Don’t believe them? They will gladly check in your video.
They literally track 75,000 basketball games a year – from high school to DI, DII, DIII, G-League, EuroLeague and NBA – and have an estimated 50 million shots tracked in their database since its creation in 2004. But when it came specifically to this year’s March Madness, Synergy recorded all games in real time and distributed a video report with data after each game ended.
Considering that teams sometimes only have 30 hours to prepare for an NCAA Tournament opponent, Synergy will also conveniently map each opponent’s plays and provide APIs for more specialized level coaching teams that have their own analytics departments.
“I don’t have [any story] for this year’s March Madness, but [in 2012] we had 15 seed Norfolk State beating 2 seed Missouri,” says Mark Silver, EVP, Sports Performance, Sportradar. “And immediately after the game, the [Norfolk State] coach called and thanked us for everything we’d done and said, ‘The only reason we won is because we had the Synergy scouting report.
One of the first customers of Sportradar’s Synergy was Jim Larranaga
One of the company’s first customers for Sportradar in 2006, in fact, was a then-relatively unknown Jim Larranaga of George Mason University – who leveraged the platform to a shocking Final Four that season. Now Larranaga is back in the Final Four with Miami and again with Synergy.
The product helps coaches on several levels, the first being game preparation. Initiative will provide an opponent’s innate tendencies, such as which direction a pole player tends to spin towards the basket – off his right or left shoulder.
Another new activation is quantifying each player’s role in this year’s NCAA tournament. Synergy’s software can determine any player’s positional characteristics, relying on a database that contains all college player plays since 2014.
By using artificial intelligence to categorize each player, Synergy has perhaps become the technological centerpiece of the transfer portal. “Without a doubt, we’ve played an important role in transforming the transfer portal because you can log into our system,” says Silver.
“And if you’re looking for a player type or a player in a certain class, whether they’re playing in JUCO or D1 or D2 or D3 – or if you already know the player – you can easily go and find every game that that player has played. Since high school, probably”.
“Or, if you just need to fill a vacancy, you can search and query the system to try to find a player that best fits what you’re looking for. So recruiting, prospecting, transfers: that’s a big one for us.” .
The Synergy Automated Camera system is another high-tech advantage, as its camera view tracks shot quality and team/player trends, while also providing film and video confirmation from the coach. Hawk-Eye cameras take care of that for the NBA.
