New analysis of basketball players and games is coming to NBA fans live and online this 2025–2026 season thanks to Amazon Web Services’ AI and some seriously detailed movement tracking. The new stats come as part of the rollout of a new basketball intelligence platform called “NBA Inside the Game.” Fans will get more granular player metrics, like tracking individual defenders during an offensive play or quantifying how hard each shot was for a player to take.
The new tech will track 29 body parts of each player as they move across the court — although which specific body parts and exactly how they will be tracked, AWS did not say. The movements will feed into the AI system to deliver stats that “capture previously unmeasured aspects of basketball,” the company says.
Ballers can now be analyzed not just by whether or not they made the shot but by the difficulty of their attempted shots. Another stat, called the Expected Field Goal Percentage, can predict the odds of their making that shot by factoring in metrics like the orientation and pose of the shooter and the positions of the defenders, among other details.
Another new stat called Gravity is meant to quantify the “advantage” individual players bring on the court. In practice, this means tracking the movement of players and their defenders with and without the ball to analyze how closely they are being guarded and how their movements make advantageous space on the court for teammates. Another new insight promised by AWS is a set of stats focused entirely on the defenders, called the Defensive Score Box, which will break down typical stats such as rebounds or blocks by the defensive players for that play.
And if detailed game statistics aren’t enough, diehard fans can search NBA footage at the level of individual plays with a new tool called Play Finder housed alongside the new statistics on NBA Inside the Game.
Fans will see the new stats on live NBA game broadcasts as well as the NBA app and website. Live analytics are not new to the NBA or other major leagues in sports. The NFL and MLB both use Sony’s Hawk-Eye cameras to track plays, pucks, and baseballs during games. Wimbledon’s decision to use the Hawk-Eye line-calling system to make calls on tennis balls shocked staid tennis fans.
It’s not the first NBA and Amazon partnership. In 2024, the two struck an 11-year media rights deal to stream 66 regular-season NBA games per year on Prime Video. The first game comes to Prime on October 24th. The new deal also made AWS the official cloud and cloud AI partner for the NBA and its affiliate leagues, including the WNBA.
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