With more than 400 league partners, including the NFL, English Premier League and Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), Genius Sports is not only attempting to give them and their sponsors a better look at their fans, but it’s also putting that data on the screen to give fans and brands more ways to interact with the game.
“We’re becoming advanced as a community that embraces privacy, embraces consent and embraces transparency to give the ultimate value to the audience you’re trying to reach by having a true conversation with them and not thinking that they’re a Bills fan when they’re a Raiders fan,” Puentes said.
Investing in data equity
When the WNBA opened its season on May 14, it did so using Genius Sports’ Second Spectrum 3D tracking technology at each game. An array of cameras is placed in every WNBA arena, and Second Spectrum tracks player positioning and ball movement.
“Technology continues to fundamentally change the sports landscape,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a statement. “Deploying state-of-the-art optical tracking technology through Genius Sports will deliver rich data to our teams that they can leverage to enhance player performance while informing in-game strategy and enable a new wave of insights and media elements for fans.”
Puentes noted that the league is currently using Second Spectrum primarily to measure shot quality, shooter impact, time in the paint, efficiency, points per chance, contest quality and defensive matchup data. It can break down performance metrics to a player’s maximum speed and total distance covered.
“It is really exciting that our league is adopting this type of technology,” said New York Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb. “The system capabilities are far more comprehensive than anything before seen in the WNBA and will greatly enhance strategic planning across the league.”
For its part, Genius Sports integrates all official WNBA tracking data into its basketball insights and analytics engine. The WNBA, meanwhile, becomes the first women’s professional sports league in the U.S. to use league-wide 3D tracking data and contributes to a data set that puts its metrics on par with those of its men’s counterparts.
“Basketball is going to be basketball, whether it’s a man or woman playing, and technology is not going to have a bias—it’s just going to tell you the data,” Puentes said. “It’s going to help you be better, and it’s going to bring parity across the leagues in cases like the NBA and WNBA.”