With Luka Doncic having recently put on one of the more spectacular performances in an NBA postseason series ever, now seems as good a time as any to relitigate how he was regarded by scouts and talent evaluators only a few short years ago.
Ahead of the 2018 NBA Draft, Doncic, from Slovenia, was just 19 years old – but coming off a wildly successful season with Real Madrid, in which he averaged 16.0 points, 4.8 rebounds and 4.3 assists in EuroLeague play and helped elevate his club to a league championship. His statistics – solid, but hardly sensational, by NBA standards – happened to translate exceptionally well when viewed in context, especially given his age. Yet his limited traditional athletic measurables (and, not to be discounted, his appearance) led many NBA talent evaluators to question his true potential. Doncic would be selected third overall, behind DeAndre Ayton and Marvin Bagley III, two standout Americans from blueblood college basketball programs. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Doncic was the best player in that year’s draft – and it wasn’t close.
All of which begs the question: Despite the expertise and experience of NBA scouts, how is it that sometimes even exceptional talent, like 6 feet 8 inches of undeniable potential, can still be overlooked?
Closing the Scouting Information Gap With Technology
Let’s first establish this: scouting is hard. Even if an organization were able to access and verify every knowable physical metric and movement characteristic of every available player, no technology exists that is capable of measuring or foreseeing attributes such as a player’s game intelligence, vision, mental fortitude or coachability. There is also no fool-proof predictor of durability, recovery speed or a player’s ability to play through pain and minor injuries. Even modern scouting departments, when comparing apples to apples, so to speak, are left to relying on unscientific historical equivalencies and intuition in their assessments. As a talent evaluator in any sport, it’s impossible to see everything.
That said, technology and data have been helping to close the uncertainty gap in scouting for some time now – and we know that it is technically possible to shrink that space even further. Sportlight’s player-tracking system, for instance, is equipped with exceptionally accurate and dynamic LiDAR-based performance tech, which has the capability to capture comprehensive movement data and expertly aggregate it for the purposes of talent evaluation. The sticking point: access.
Unlocking Data Troves With Equivalent Tech Access
Returning to the case of Doncic, there would have been no guarantee that every league talent evaluator would have been on the mark in their assessments of the Mavericks guard – even if every NBA team was equipped with Sportlight (or any other player-tracking system). Why? Because Real Madrid or the Slovenian national team also would have had to be using an equivalent system. Comparing data across systems is unreliable, but the NBA can’t expect every far-flung global league or organization to use the same technology that it does.
But isn’t the same true for world-class football, and yet Sportlight can be found ubiquitously across the Premier League? Yes, but given the infrastructure of the EPL (including youth academies), the players being evaluated by the top clubs frequently have already spent time on a Sportlight-equipped pitch. The NBA, by contrast, saw in its last draft two players selected from France, two from a basketball academy and one from the G-League – all in the top 10 picks alone. The global basketball player-tracking infrastructure isn’t yet advanced enough to ensure reliable data comparisons.
Interestingly, certain other sports exist in the sort of self-contained ecosystem that could make for widespread reliable data collection and comparison. The NFL, for example, has the resources to equip each of its stadiums with equivalent player-tracking tech, as well as in certain key venues (at the Senior Bowl and NFL Draft Combine), and it might even consider subsidizing equipment for NCAA programs in the Power 5 conferences, from which the league draws the vast majority of its talent.
None of this is to say leagues or individual organizations that don’t benefit from a favorable ecosystem should ignore player tracking or shrug off finding ways to close the data-collection gap. Teams derive enormous benefits from tracking both their own players and those of opponents, and a database of dynamic, reliable information that is somewhat incomplete still beats the alternatives. As more advancements are made in the field of performance tracking and access to reliable tech grows, having the pieces already in place to take advantage is one of the few steps sports organizations can take to set themselves apart from the competition.
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