Golden State holds a competitive advantage. Its secret? The Warriors are based in the Bay Area, the same place where Silicon Valley calls home.
Technology and data analysis are pillars of the Warriors' front office and they make it a point to immerse the numbers and hoops together. For example: the team's stats guy, Sammy Gelfand, rebounds for the players every day rather than getting holed up in a remote office like other teams' analytical gurus.
They're as nerdy as it gets. As clients of wearable technology provider Catapult Sports, the Warriors monitor their players' workloads in practice with GPS monitors and analyze the data with acute attention to maximizing performance while minimizing injury risk.
The latest project: With the training staff, Gelfand and the team's data programmers, the Warriors are engineering a "readiness" rating for each player built on a 0-to-100 scale where 100 is prime shape and 0 is completely burnt out.
The idea is to give Kerr a handy all-in-one metric that aggregates various health indicators, including a daily five-question survey given to the players to help assess their soreness. Simple questions like, "How do you feel?" and "What's your mood?" and "How'd you sleep?" Each question has multiple phrases that the players choose from. Each answer corresponds to a number on a five-point scale. The lower the number, the lower the stress levels.
"It's research," Lyles says of the survey. "The wording in the answers are specific so it gives guys a good guide. Each guy is very individual. I may ask you the same questions. We want a low score. The best score you can have is a five. So let's say your average is an 11, that's your norm after months of doing it. It's 5 to 25. One point for each question.
Leading sports scientists are marveling at LeBron James in the NBA Finals and wondering how much longer he can go.
"You come in, now you have two days that are 18 and 19. Alright, now that's a trigger. He's normally an 11, let's check in. If it's sleep, we'll look at the questions that are bad. We'll look at the travel."
The Warriors noticed that player stress was linked to lack of sleep. So they rescheduled their flights to the day after, not the night of games, so they could sleep in and get a full night's rest.