Powering Smarter Performance Decisions with AI in the NBA

Contributors: Kevin Carlino, Management Consulting Principal; Tyler Powell, Sr Data Engineer; and Haeon Yoon, Sr Consultant

The tip-off

Winning in the NBA doesn't just come down to what happens under the lights; it starts in the training room, the weight room and the data room.

From coaches to sports scientists to executives, everyone wants to know:

• Who's peaking and who's approaching overload?
• What's really moving the needle on wins?
• How can we get ahead of risk before it turns into an injury?
• How do our top players compare to all-stars around the league?

To better answer these questions, one NBA franchise partnered with World Wide Technology (WWT) to reimagine how they collected, accessed and acted on player performance and health data. 

The challenge

The organization had no shortage of information, from movement tracking systems and force plate data to neuromuscular testing tools, but turning that data into actionable insights was a different story.

They relied on a range of specialized vendors, including Kinexon, Hawkin Dynamics, KangaTech and DEXA scans, each capturing different aspects of player performance. However, none of these systems were designed to work together, leaving the data fragmented and difficult to interpret.

Building on the issue, much of the data had to be gathered manually or exported in inconsistent formats. Sports scientists spent hours cleaning files and uploading them into Power BI dashboards, an inefficient process that made it nearly impossible to generate timely insights or build a cohesive view of player performance.

Without a centralized system or an intuitive way to explore their data, every decision felt like playing defense.

The mission: build a unified, AI-enabled analytics platform on Google Cloud that puts the ball squarely in every decision-maker's hands.

The assist: Google Cloud + WWT

To overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of our client's data, WWT stepped in to design and implement a centralized data platform on Google Cloud, giving the organization a single source of truth for all things performance.

Built using key Google Cloud services like BigQuery and Dataplex, the environment brought together a wide range of player performance and health data in a centralized, secure platform that was ready to power the next level of insights.

Beyond organization, the platform enabled automation by streamlining data collection from sensors and eliminating manual uploads. Instead of relying on sports scientists to input data from various sources, the system now ingests and updates information automatically each morning. As a result, dashboards and reports are always up to date, freeing up sports scientists to focus on strategy rather than data wrangling.

With the data now flowing in automatically and consistently, WWT also helped normalize and structure the data, transforming massive, unstructured datasets into clean, intuitive tables. Instead of sifting through thousands of fields, users can now explore specific metrics like jump height, acceleration or recovery time with ease. This structure made it possible to generate narratives around player fatigue, performance trends and injury risk — key insights that were previously buried in noise.

The game changer: Explore Assistant + Conversation Analytics

We didn't just organize the playbook. We gave teams the tools to run smarter plays with AI at their fingertips. 

Enter Explore Assistant and Conversation Analytics, Google's natural language tools that brought a new level of speed and simplicity to the franchise's analytics playbook.

With these tools, performance staff and executives alike can now ask questions like:

• "How did acceleration patterns shift across our last three-game stretch?"
• "What's the workload trend for Player X leading into back-to-back games?"
• "When we win, what are the metrics that consistently show up?"
• "How does my starting five impact my sales revenue on game day?"

No more waiting on dashboards. No need to translate business questions into SQL. Just fast, accurate answers on demand.

This was especially valuable for coaches and executives without technical backgrounds. They could now explore data independently without relying on a single sports scientist to interpret complex reports late at night after a game.

To support comparative insights, the platform also integrated select league-wide performance benchmarks, allowing staff to evaluate how their players stacked up against peers across the league, without exposing sensitive or open-source data.

The impact

This wasn't just about better reports. It was about changing how the team played the game behind the scenes.

• Performance staff could adjust workloads in real time, while medical teams used data-driven insights to spot risks early and keep injured players off the court.
• Coaches could make smarter lineup decisions, backed by live data, not just gut instinct.
• Executives had instant visibility into trends, risks and what was driving wins.
• Sports scientists were free to focus on deeper strategy, as the solution eliminated repetitive data pulls and saved the team countless hours of manual work each week.

The result? A team that could move faster, think sharper and stay one step ahead, no matter who they were facing on the court.

And with a scalable foundation built on Google Cloud, this approach is ready to grow with the team's vision, whether that involves new data sources, predictive models or supporting other departments across the organization.

Final score

Every possession matters. Every insight counts.

With Google Cloud's AI-powered tools and WWT's data expertise, this NBA franchise turned fragmented information into a fluid system of decision-making — one where performance, health and strategy all speak the same language.

For any organization looking to win with data, the playbook is ready.