How AI Is Changing Basketball Without Replacing the People Who Drive It

A few years ago, “advanced stats” in basketball meant plus-minus and shot charts. Now, the NBA is wiring the game into the cloud and using AI to surface things fans and coaches could feel but never measure.

Through a deep partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the NBA now tracks 29 data points per player in real time—billions of on-court data points across the league. That raw information feeds NBA Inside the Game powered by AWS, a new platform designed to translate complexity into insight.

Instead of just points and rebounds, fans will see AI-powered metrics like Defensive Box Score, which identifies who is guarding whom, how often defenders apply ball pressure, when they switch, and when double teams form. Shot Difficulty / Expected FG% evaluates orientation, defensive pressure, and court positioning to show how “makeable” a shot really was. Gravity finally quantifies how much defensive attention a star like Steph Curry or Damian Lillard commands—and how much space they create for teammates.

On the analysis side, AI tools such as Play Finder—built with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock—let broadcasters, and eventually fans, search for similar plays across thousands of games. Want every time a team ran a specific pick‑and‑roll action late in the fourth? Type it in, compare, and learn.

Teams are using the same backbone of cloud and AI to move from intuition to data-informed development. The Toronto Raptors and MLSE, early AWS adopters, built the Raptors Shooting Lab, where multiple cameras capture every shot and AI models return biomechanical metrics like elbow velocity, release angle, stance width, and trajectory. Coaches still teach, but now with far richer feedback.

Behind the scenes, content teams are getting their own assist. MLSE’s Gen AI Dynamic Video Editor, powered by Amazon Bedrock, lets editors type prompts like “buzzer beater hail-marys that ended up being game winners” and instantly surface and assemble clips—turning hours of archival grunt work into minutes, while leaving storytelling and judgment firmly in human hands. It’s a big reason MLSE was named the NBA’s Most Innovative Team of 2024.

Across the league, the pattern is clear: AI is making the invisible visible, transforming how we watch, train, and create around basketball. Not by replacing people, but by giving them better vision, faster tools, and more time to focus on what only humans can do.