sports: money, data & fun
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Partly what’s driving the changes is the size of the fortunes at stake. The typical salary for an N.B.A. player is now close to $12 million a year. Career reserves — not just the stars — often employ their own trainers, dietitians, chefs and assortments of recovery gizmos. When a member of James’s inner circle claimed in 2018 that James was spending about $1.5 million a year on caring for his body, it accelerated an arms race across sports, helping to power a consumer-tech boom that has already trickled down to the $314 billion market for wearable devices that track things like sleep and heart rate.
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Today’s pros are awash in data, and the ones who learn to sort out the signals from the noise stand the best chance of prolonging their careers.
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Most of that data is still noise. “Just because you can measure it” — using wearable devices, for example — “doesn’t mean it’s meaningful, durable, that kind of thing,” says Dr. Michael Joyner, a specialist in the physiology of elite athletes at the Mayo Clinic. The most useful data so far, he says, speaking for himself and not the clinic, relates to “load management”: monitoring exertion, particularly by older players, to reduce the risk of fatigue-related, noncontact injuries. …
Since 2021, the N.B.A. has run an in-house incubator called Launchpad that collaborates annually with five small start-ups whose projects might prove useful to the league — an A.I. tool to track officiating, say, or a device that converts gameplay into haptics for
sight-impaired fans.
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As part of the effort to collect joint and muscle data, every single N.B.A. player, from LeBron to Bronny, now takes a brief “biomechanical assessment” up to four times a year. The assessment room I visited, at the Brooklyn Nets facility, looked like a miniature Marvel movie set — bright space, blank walls, a ring of cameras to capture motion — only this room had two “force plates” built into the floor that help measure applied muscle force.
The assessment covers seven simple movements — various lunges, jumps and timed balances — and produces a player score relative to the rest of the league and the player’s own history.
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For some athletes, the right biometric data presented in the right context represents “permission to rest,” says Ana Montero, a co-founder of Atlas, a San Francisco-based company that makes brain-wave-scanning, behind-the-ear wearables about the size of Mentos candies. “It’s quantifiable evidence that is showing you: Dude, today — or right now — is not the day. Go to the gym, go for a walk, go for whatever it is. And then coming back and actually seeing that you’ve bounced back.”
The Atlas device gathers several types of data, including
electroencephalography, or EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, and galvanic skin response, or G.S.R., which is what a polygraph test measures. That data is sorted into five categories (among them agility, vitality and stress) and then delivered with advice through a smartphone app.
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