For the eighth straight year, the' most forward-thinking minds in sports flocked to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to discuss and share big ideas with professors, professionals, and peers. Academics, league and team executives, analysts, bloggers and enthusiasts all rubbed elbows, soaked in data-rich panel programming and took a peek into the future of sports.The MLB, NFL, NHL, MLS, English Premier League, NASCAR, and NBA were all represented by officials and panelists at the conference, which, overall, boasted 2,000 attendees, hailing from over 180 academic institutions, over 80 pro teams, and over 300 sports industry organizations.
They were there to talk about what works and doesn't work in sports, what makes certain players successful and other not, the tools used to evaluate those successes and failures, and the growing understanding that new stats and "old school" values work in concert, not conflict.
Basketball is where the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference made its bones, and while baseball, football, soccer and hockey all have healthy presences, the NBA still most strongly flavors the event.
Celtics Director of Basketball Analytics David Sparks discussed the evolution of the conference, and its appeal.
"This year, I've really enjoyed just getting to see other people who are doing sort of my parallel job," Sparks said. "So it's just nice to meet everybody. And see faces; a lot of people's names I've heard. It's nice to put names on faces. So, for me, so far that's been the main appeal."
All the different walks of the sports world were represented at SAP's panel: "The Inflection Point in Sports: How Big Data and Analytics are Changing The Game." SAP vice president Frank Wheeler was joined by NBA Vice President of Information Technology Ken DeGennaro, MLB executive Oscar Fernandez, who oversees application development and business intelligence for pro baseball, Washington Redskins Vice President of Technology Asheesh Kinra, and former tennis pro and current analyst Mary Joe Fernandez.
The panel showcased multiple SAP-enabled charting tools. Scouting reports on football players can be ranked and itemized with tools that look like the player evaluation pages of the Madden NFL video game franchise, with sortable attributes and comparison pages. Major League Baseball, at both the league and club level, can evaluate players with what equates to the back of a live-updating digital baseball card, with modular statistics that can be weighted for every situation and comparison. Fernandez discussed tennis tracking data, and how she aims to use that data for stronger, more informative broadcasts.
Everything in the panel revolved around how greater, more specific information informs the way we process and enjoy the games. Everything sought to increase the vocabulary of sports conversation, as well as move away from anecdotal information and towards quantifiable. Everyone professed a desire to create the tools, and make them a part of the fan experience, so that there could be a base for the next data breakthrough. Baseball, according to Fernandez, will openly reach out to fan corners of the Internet, to integrate cutting-edge stats like UZR and leverage index. The goal of the NBA's highly data-rich website, which allows players' performances to be inspected in myriad ways, is for fans to "contribute, and feel more invested in the product," according to DeGennaro.
For all the excitement and positivity, the competitive juices were also flowing. And not every sport felt as well-represented as the others.
Devin Pleuler, an Advanced Data Analyst for Opta, the company responsible for the official league statistics of Major League Soccer and the English Premier League, was unimpressed by the soccer panel, which he felt poorly represented soccer analytics' cutting edge.
"The soccer analytics movement has come out of a blogosphere kind of atmosphere," Pleuler said. "All the major advances of the last 18 months have come out of the soccer blogging ecosystem, which is where I came from.
"We're asking much more in-depth, answerable questions that these guys are not really aware of. There's a very real disconnect between whatever went on here organizing the soccer panel and the actual people involved in soccer analytics.
"You could have put Brian Bilello, president of the New England Revolution, probably the most forward-thinking soccer organization in the world, with how they approach analytics from the top down, instead of bottom-up. He's here at Sloan, with his analysts. These guys actually have real-life experience with this, not just in the technical end, but also in the implementation of it, which is continuing the conversation that's going on in these other panels. It's, 'Well, we have these really good analytics, how do we implement it?' These guys are doing that, and there's not a lot of guys that are. And that's happening in our own backyard here in Boston. And here we are, at Sloan, and it's frustrating."
Still, for any shortcomings, there was plenty of excitement.
Sparks said that, compared to past years, "There are a lot more people here, and everything that goes with that. It's exciting to see how much it's grown.
"To see everyone here with an interest in this kind of thing is exciting because it's the stuff I'm interested in."
For all the forward thinking, information appeared to move at different speeds in the different sports geospheres.
For Pleuler, and perhaps the soccer community, it was a matter of the conference's priorities. "What's too bad about Sloan is that it's turned into such a media event, where it's not actually beneficial for all these soccer people to come," he said.
For Rishabh Desai, a 23-year-old, first-year basketball operations analyst and recent San Francisco State graduate, things are much brighter.
"(Analytics) are slowly becoming more respected, more appreciated, now, especially because of this conference," he said. "I think this conference is actually one of the things that has made it more popular."
Many different worlds are summoning all their academic and corporate might, and demandingly asking the most critical questions in sports. That is the heart of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
As Desai described it, "People are starting to look at it more as a science than a sport, which is kind of cool. It's fun to combine the two worlds."
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