Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing, multi-part series examining the big-picture trends and concerns about the current NBA.
Every year, the NBA likes to roll out a skit at its annual Technology Summit during All-Star Weekend. Last year, in San Francisco, it was a robotic shooting coach for Steph Curry; the year before in Indianapolis it was Victor Wembanyama using something called NB-AI as his own personal basketball Siri. The ideas change — though Ahmad Rashad is a constant — and while they are mostly (presumably) tongue-in-cheek, they also are a peek into how the league views itself.
For most of the first eight decades of its existence, the NBA was a basketball league and built it into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth. Over the last few years, however, the league has begun to think of itself in a different light inside of its midtown Manhattan offices.
NBA executives say this evolution in mission and perspective is not a redirection of what the league has traditionally done, but an outgrowth of it. The league now needs to not only sell its media rights, but also get involved in producing games.
It not only hires a company to use high-end cameras to track every movement a player makes on the basketball court, but also partners with Amazon to digest the information and create advanced analytics. The NBA is not just a bystander in how fans consume its sport, but also tries to nudge them along, too.
Commissioner Adam Silver regularly talks about artificial intelligence, adaptive game streams and an NBA ecosystem so futuristic it may seem ripped from the Jetsons. The Tech Summit may have been around for 25 years but increasingly the NBA seems to be putting tech at the forefront of what it does.
It is not just a mental rejiggering for the league, but one that has changed who it hires and where it puts its resources. Now, when the NBA talks about itself, according to people inside the league office and in its public statements, the league has given itself a wide scope and redefined what it considers itself to be, not just as an operator concerned with its on-court product but also as a tech and media company.
“My answer is yes, and,” Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive VP of basketball strategy, said, “the two are not mutually exclusive. And at our core, we have been, are, and always will be, a basketball company, because basketball is the core product that we’re selling to our fans and to our media partners. And so everything that I focus on right in my world is ‘How do we make basketball the best possible product to ultimately engage those fans?’
“We essentially hand it off to the rest of the business to figure out the best ways to take the game of basketball and engage fans. And I think that’s where we become the world-leading media and technology company.”
Last month, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league had recently gone through a “reorganization.” It integrated its marketing units directly within other sectors, putting a heavier emphasis on data in the process. That reorg is among the personnel changes the league has undergone in recent years, including layoffs in 2023.
“As I’ve been telling my colleagues,” Silver said at the Front Office Sports conference, “I think we need to develop a bit of a new muscle.”
That need is evident in the many areas the league now operates in and could find necessary in the future. Most of the innovation is focused around its media aims, but also impacts the on-court product.
The NBA has gotten involved in its teams’ local broadcasts by supporting its streaming apps, and the league may eventually launch a local market League Pass in the next few years and maybe even later produce games. It took over NBA TV earlier this month after the league split from TNT Sports in its latest media rights deal.
It is an outgrowth of its NBA App revamp in 2022, where the league hoped to make its app a hub for fans — a place for them to watch its games and original content and share highlights — and as a funnel into the future of basketball with games including emerging young high school and international players. It was while re-developing the app that the NBA realized it needed to build out its tech capabilities and find new tech companies to work with that could support them.
Earlier this decade, the league also ramped up its investment arm with NBA Investments, through which it takes stakes in companies who work on issues that align with the league’s interests, and began its own tech incubator called NBA Launchpad.
“It’s critical in order to be successful, especially when you’re dealing with a very broad and global audience,” Christopher Benyarko, the NBA’s executive VP of direct-to-consumer, said, adding that the league can “not just truly rely on others to kind of drive that innovation, and that technology.”
The partnerships the league has made with tech companies have also been used internally to buoy its product. The NBA signed a deal with Sony’s Hawk-Eye in 2023 to provide player tracking data — incorporating 29 data points on a player’s body and collected 60 times per second — and hopes to use that to also help player health and safety. It changed the name of its internal Basketball Technology and Innovation group to Basketball R&D and has a team of engineers — hired from autonomous vehicle companies and big tech, Wasch said — to work on autonomous officiating. For now, that officiating is constrained to goaltending and basket interference calls, as it has been since the partnership began, but the NBA continues to hire engineers for it (machine learning expertise, quite necessary).
It is working with AI and large language models not only to create its season schedules or new statistics that it can deploy across broadcasts and to fans, but also to test translations of its broadcasts in other languages. There could be a day, Benyarko said, when the NBA can create a broadcast in another language voiced by AI.
The league is also using AI in its development program. It gauges teenagers at its Basketball Without Borders programs and uses technology to discern which ones have the markers that could one day make them elite players and to decide who to try to funnel into its academies and other youth programs, Wasch said.
The NBA also uses science and technology to determine if its on-court product resonates with fans and whether to tweak its rules. The league has used physiological research to measure how its fans responded to on-court changes, including hiring third-party vendors that asked fans to visit a research laboratory, where it adorned them with heart rate and skin moisture monitors while they watch games to understand their physiological responses to what they see.
This research was vital for the league last season during a time when there was public discussion of whether there was too much 3-point shooting in the NBA. Their research, Wasch said, showed that fans enjoyed the 3-point shot: it was among their favorite parts of a game.
“Now you could conclude that naturally, there might be a tipping point where, if you had too many 3s, that would start to flip, because it would just become commonplace and not an exciting play anymore,” Wasch said. “But we were able to look at a lot of that data that we have to give us a little bit of reassurance that we don’t think we’re at that point.
“There was a bit of an overreaction last year to what ultimately was an increase of about two 3-pointers per team per game.To have that quantitative underpinning to the conversation was important to make sure that we didn’t overreact to an early season trend.”
The emphasis on media and technology may underpin the NBA’s larger ambitions. While it has loosely hinted at expansion recently, the NBA has set its sights abroad. It launched the Basketball Africa League five years ago and is now turning to Europe with a new independent league that could start by 2028. Silver has said, aspirationally, that could ultimately lead, one day, to European teams playing NBA franchises in its NBA Cup.
But it does suggest where the league hopes to go in the future. It has decided that being just an entertainment company isn’t enough.
The league, Benyarko said, needs to think and act like a “new age media company.”