The explosion in available player metrics in many ways has made evaluation more difficult than ever, said several team owners during a panel at the IMG World Congress of Sports. "The amount of data available to us this year is 10 times larger than everything else in recorded history. We're now getting spacial data, which changes things dramatically," said NBA Kings Managing Partner Vivek Ranadive, referencing in part the NBA's new league-wide deal with Stats LLC for player tracking. "We live in a time with more data available than we know what to do with." DC United General Partner Will Chang, who is also an investor in several other teams, said the wave of analytics has helped increase the amount of psychological testing done on players. He said part of that is driven by the constraints of salary caps in several sports. "We're doing a lot of psychological profiling on players, as we have to be very smart on how we pick them," Chang said. "That's something we obviously don't do as much in our other businesses." Warriors co-Owner Joe Lacob said traditional scouting remains critical, even with the advent of modern analytics. "We've been analytic-oriented from the beginning,” he said. “We were doing player tracking even before it went leaguewide. But you still need a mix between data and the eye test and scouting. We still don't make a decision on analytics alone."
