When you’ve been staring at a puzzle and can’t figure it out, the fresh eyes of someone who’s never seen it before often produces breakthroughs. TIBCO Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive brought such new strategies and applied data analytics to his first experience with basketball. He had never played the game but coached his daughter’s team to a championship season.
The author of two best selling business and strategy books “The Power of Now” and “The Power to Predict“, Ranadive couldn’t understand why, on defense, most teams retreated to defend only the basket instead of pressing and challenging passes. The alternative, profiled in Forbes magazine, was a tough defense, keeping the ball close to the hoop where your team scores points – instead of just limiting an opponent’s baskets. As a new part-owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, Ranadive is already finding new approaches: He wants to bring the NBA to India, growing the popularity as the professional league has been exported to Eastern Europe with players from the Balkans region or to China thanks to Yao Ming’s fame with the Houston Rockets.
Applying data visualization tools, intense analytics to study team performance and patterns of other players is just part of the ways Spotfire can make data into a competitive advantage. Seeing trends in shot selection, location of plays on the court or patterns of hits, misses, rebounds and other statistics can help the coaches select the right plays with the best chance of success.
That kind of predictive modeling has certainly helped TIBCO find ‘actionable’ data that companies can use to be more efficient, tap new opportunities and make better decisions more quickly. Even if there’s no 24-second clock in your office, you need the right data, right now to fuel smart action.
The growing influence of data and analytics in basketball was covered in a recent blog post and will be a key part of tomorrow’s MIT Sloan School Conference on Sports Analytics – read more on the event from the Boston Globe. You can also follow the event’s twitter hashtag #SSAC to stay informed.
David Wallace
Spotfire Blogging Team
