Synergy Sports Technology is a company which owns and operates a real-time video-indexing statistical engine. Synergy’s products and services are used by professional sports teams, broadcasters and fortune 500 businesses around the world.
Most NBA teams use Synergy’s professional content delivery network to enjoy instant video streaming playback via queried statistical displays. The online service is run by Garrick Barr, who worked for the Phoenix Suns for 11 years and logs every possession of every game, going beyond the boxscore to tell you what kind of action produced the play’s result. Was it a fast break, a pick-and-roll, a post-up or a spot-up? From what area of the floor did the action start? And did the player drive left, drive right or pull up for a jumper?
Kobe Bryant’s offense comes from:
28% isolation situations,
22% post-ups,
11% as the pick-and-roll ball-handler,
and the rest in an amalgam of transition, cuts, spot-ups, etc.
His breakdown of jump shots is even more eerily balanced: Exactly a third of his shots come from 0-17 feet, another third from 17 feet out to the three-point line, and the other third from beyond the arc. When he’s isolated, it’s almost as equally divided between on the left side, the right, and the top of the key. He shows a slight preference for driving right (57% of the time to 43% left) while regardless of the direction he prefers to, in order, pull up for the jumper, get to the rim and, more rarely and less effectively, shoot a runner.
Available tools with Synergy Sports include a fully integrated video editing system that combines downloaded and locally captured video. Clients have options for tagging to automate custom edits, video transfers to any device that has an internet connection.
Synergy employs more than 100 loggers, will have every regular-season game completely broken down within 30 minutes of the final buzzer. So, after a coach is done talking to his team and addressing the media, he’ll be able to sit down at the computer with his assistants and figure out what went right or wrong that night. He can download the video and still beat his players to the team bus.
Synergy also develops tools that will closely resemble the opponent scouting reports that teams provide to their players. And by the time the playoffs roll around, teams will have a tool that allows them to quickly create player-edits, videos of each individual opponent that players can watch on their computer. Such a task normally takes several days of non-stop work on the part of a team’s video coordinator.
While Synergy seems tailor-made for a coach, its biggest benefit until recently was helping teams prepare for the Draft. That’s because it has countless college and international games logged as well. As teams put together their Draft board and debate the value of specific prospects, they can call up video of a player to help them make their decisions. And because each play is logged, there’s no searching through hours of tape to find the right play.
In the end, the best way to gain knowledge about players and teams is to combine every tool available. NBA teams can run a query through StatsCube. And then they can check out the video on Synergy Sports.