Industry Q&A: Garrick Barr, CEO of Synergy Sports Technology

Flickr | davefayram

Heading into the All-Star Break, there was big news for stat-hungry NBA fans:

After Synergy Sports Technology discontinued the “MySynergy” app just prior to this season[1. More on that in a second.], it’s absence has been felt. Even as someone with some reservations about relying on top level play coding as a hard-core analytics tool, the ability to see breakdowns of the amount of time various teams spend in isolation situations or rough estimates of their ability to contain pick-and-roll point guards has been a loss. Even more so, having linked video of plays certainly makes visual breakdowns a much quicker task. Continuing the NBA’s longstanding trend of driving fan interest through data and interactivity, help was on the way.

Hinted at by some cryptic tweets from Co-Founder and CEO Garrick Barr over the last few weeks, on Thursday morning NBA.com unveiled the first iteration of Synergy-based play type data. Including 11 play types and some basic sorting functionality, we can now see the Phoenix Suns spend more than twice the amount of time in transition offense as do the plodding Charlotte Hornets, or than out-of-nowhere sensation Hassan Whiteside is averaging 1.56 points per possession as a pick-and-roll finisher, shooting 79.3%(!) on those chances.

I spoke with Barr about how this came about in a wide-ranging interview, covering many topics including Charles Barkley’s recent comments on analytics:

Q: So, a little announcement this morning….

A: Yes, we’re now up on Stats.NBA.com on the tab called “Play Type”. There’s some extensive stats and definitions based on various play types. They are planning on having some stories up, written around this data about this first version.

Later on, you’ll be able to filter the data more finally, but we just wanted to get this first version up before the [All-Star] break. NBA.com has really powerful splits and filters that they will be able to apply. They [NBA.com] have had our information for years[2. Synergy and the NBA have been in partnership since 2008.], using our “Pro” products.

Once these filters are in place, I think it’s going to be a more powerful tool than anything writers and bloggers have had in the past. You’ll be able to link to video[3. Universal blogger reaction captured here.] There will be leaderboards for players and play types. Eventually, down the road you’ll be able to filter by game situation.

Q. How did this come about? Was it related to the discontinuation of the consumer product?

It was more happenstance. For complex business reasons we dropped the “MySynergy” site, but I started talking to my guys in the NBA. They said they felt our data belonged on NBA.com, so we started talking about. Pretty quickly it became clear they [the NBA] was interested in a full-out effort involving a lot of our data. We’ve had to scale it back a little bit from our full data set – we go into 15 or 20 phases of data and that’s just overkill for most people.. What we provide to ESPN, ABC, Turner Sports is a different level than what fans would want to see on NBA.com. But it’s going to be pretty darn good.

As time goes by, we’ll see what we might fold into the NBA.com product. We’ve worked carefully with them to provide them with an API into our raw data, it’s been tested heavily over the last few days to make sure everything lines up, the data displays as intended.

We’re very excited, we think this is going to be a great thing for fans and good for us to.

Q. Is this going to include and replace most of the functionality of the “MySynergy” product?

I think it will. I think the NBA knew writers and bloggers were going to be disappointed when access to Synergy was curtailed. That decision [to discontinue “MySynergy”] had nothing to do with the NBA, they are big fans of ours, obviously. It was more for business reasons we pulled out of that product, but that doesn’t mean we’re staying out of more fan-focused products. This is a great way to get this information back into the hands of bloggers and fans, it’s very powerful. Once we add in some of the filtering functionality, it’s going to be even more powerful than the previous offering, I think.

In terms of “high-level” play types, I’m not sure what more you could ask for. Yes, you could get deeper in terms of drive directions, moves players make, slicing it thinly with respect to where players like to set up and who is guarding them. There’s just so much more we track. In fact by next season we’re going to double or triple the number of things we track in terms of possessions and plays. But that’s primarily for teams and media partners, getting information at that level of detail.

This is a great first step for getting as much information as possible into the hands of writers and fans though. We think the NBA has hit a homerun with this, I’d say a slam dunk, but that doesn’t really work, so I’ll stick with home run. It’s presented cleanly and clearly, and I’m excited to see what more NBA.com is going to do with it over the next several months. At the same time, we have some things we want to work on internally in terms of presenting our information to fans, and we’re sorting that out now.

Q. Also, you’re a subscription-based business and you can’t be giving the store away, right?

That’s true. It’s a balancing act, but we don’t want to pick a point on the balance beam one way or the other. We’d like to push the envelope in terms of getting stuff to fans and consumers while at the same time not cannibalizing our other business. We have investors[3. Including Mavs owner Mark Cuban, who Barr describes as “a great investment partner. I sometimes turn to him for advice. I think Mark’s amazing and we’re happy is part of our team.”] we’re responsible to.

From the start, we’ve always tried to create and provide something coaches needed. I was a coach in the NBA,[4. Barr was an assistant with Phoenix for a number of years, brought.] I saw what was missing. I’ve been working to put usable technology in the hands of coaches, GMS scouts and players, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. In 1992, my first year with the Suns, I picked up the first AVID digital editor used in sports. AVID formed a sports vertical after they saw how I was using it, and before you know it they were selling to every sport on every level.

That same year, I purchased a digital database, where we as a staff could all store and sync our reports, see what everybody had to say and generate rankings based on their input. All of that, I got into the NBA, I had a budgett, I saw a need and I just went out and got things to make us better. I realized that maybe I’m not meant to be a coach, maybe I’m meant to do something with sports technology and that’s what I’ve done.

Back to the point, we’re here to make life better for coaches, but I don’t see why we need to stop there [with coaches]. We want to make life better for anyone who cares about the game. We have 97% of NCAA Men’s Division I teams using our products. Hundreds of teams overseas use our service, we’re on every continent on the world  save for Antarctica.

We track everything coaches track. This isn’t Charles Barkley’s “analytics is crap” stuff, he’s in the news right now, huh?

Q. I was going to bring Barkley’s comments up because between the AVID and the database it seems like you instituted one of if not the first analytics department in the NBA at the same time Charles Barkley arrived in Phoenix.

Yes, he came to Phoenix the same year I did. That was Paul Westphal’s first year as head coach[4. Barr and Westphal were high school teammates]. Charles came right into the room where I was working on video and things and heaped praise upon what we were doing. Of course, it wasn’t known as analytics then, but Charles is Charles. I always love seeing his rants, I heard him go off on one at the tech summit at the All-Star game last year, and it’s funny stuff.

To some extent, he’s got a point. There’s a lot of guys out there[5. We at TNC resemble this remark.] trying to come up with the analytics that will help sports and make a name for themselves. But it’s hard for that stuff to make it’s way to the teams for coaches and GMs to use it. And I’m enthused that people are trying to do that kind of thing.

We [at Synergy] are coaches. We talk about what coaches talk about, what they want to know. They want to hear about pick-and-roll coverages, trap versus hedge and so on. And we track those things in great, great detail. We create visualizations so they can understand the analytics without having to look at long data tables and numbers that are difficult to interpret.[6. If there’s one constant that’s come up in discussions with industry professionals, it’s the need for analytics-based information to be presented in clean and easy-to-understand formats such as what Barr is discussing here.]

We’re just capturing what coaches want to know, and to some extent what they’ve always know. What are a player’s tendencies, does he go right or go left? Those are the questions coaches all ask. What sort of defense works against this great post player? Do you want to double him or not? If you double him where does the ball go next, who gets the shot? This is just basic basketball stuff, it’s what coaches and players have always wanted and needed to know,

There’s a reason Chris Paul is on Synergy all the time. Last year he spoke about this after winning All-Star MVP. He can look to any player he’s about to face and watch matching video to learn tendencies, in seconds. If I could have had that information when I played, it would have been so important and so useful. We’re not trying to come up with an involved angle to analyze the game. Stuff like plus/minus metrics, they can be pretty muddy, right?

If we’re tracking what James Harden does every possession, you can learn what he does. Breaking tendencies into percentages and points per possession, we can see who he his on the floor. He’ll tell you, “yeah, I like to go right. I like to set up at the top and go to the hole.” But it’s so hard for a coach to know that for every player in the league.

This stuff was born and developed in the league. I thought I knew a lot about basketball before I got to the NBA, when I was coaching in college. But then I got to the NBA and it was like I was in college myself, I learned so much. I was an assistant under 5 different head coaches and I learned different things to look at from each of them. Using those things and harnessing technology to deliver what coaches need.

GMs too. When we first started marketing to the NBA, it was the GMs it resonated with first because of what we were doing to track college kids for the draft, and GMs loved that. The college stuff it’s exploded, we’ve got full Division II conferences and NAIA conferences, even some Division III teams using us.

The coaches are now are biggest user though, they’ve caught on. What’s better for a coach than to be able to look up any player or a team, see the numbers, see what they do well and then watch matching video? 20 years ago, you had to watch a whole game. Now you can deal with an individual situation in seconds and move on to the next thing and the next and so on.

Q, The numbers and the “eyetest” in one package.

Exactly, the numbers only go so far. You might want to know “was this because of a bad call? Was a bad defender involved, was it a poor defensive scheme they were executing? Was that an appropriate scheme for that player?” These are things a coach knows that are critical for interpreting the numbers.[8. CONTEXT!] Just the numbers aren’t enough. We’ve sold numbers-only reports as early as 1998[9. With a company called Quantified Scouting, a precursor to Synergy], you needed to be able to watch video. Of course technology didn’t really support matching video at that time. But when 2004 rolled around, streaming was a big buzzword and I worked with our CTO and our co-founder, Nils Lahr who was able to make anything I could think of happen technologically.[9. Lahr developed much of the technology which became Windows Media after the rights were acquired by Microsoft.]

Given the success we’ve had and now that we have a room full of developers, we’re excited for the future. There have been a lot of ideas we’ve had that we simply couldn’t implement because we didn’t have resources in terms of the time or manpower.

Q. Thank you so much for your time. I look forward to diving into the new information you have out there.

Definitely, Go check it out!

UPDATE: I took quick run through of some of the new Synergy data here