Duke fans who want to compare this season's team with the '15 national champion squad or compare G Grayson Allen to Bobby Hurley now have a unique stats and analytics tool on the school's official athletics website. Officials from SAP began working with Duke three years ago to take all of the stats compiled over the last 100 years of Duke men's hoops and create #DukeMBBstats, an analytical extension of GoDuke.com. The platform originally launched in '15, but SAP and its analytics consultants, LSI, have revamped the site and its capabilities. The 2.0 version will be on display at the SAP booth during the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, which begins tomorrow. SAP has a similar analytics mechanism for the NBA. “This is a fan engagement tool that is changing the way fans absorb data,” said SAP Global VP and Head of Business Development for Media, Sports & Entertainment Frank Wheeler. Former Duke Dir of Internet Operations Curtis Snyder began compiling the program's basketball stats going back to its origin in 1905, and those numbers sat in a database for years. That depth of numbers and information made Duke a good first option for SAP in the college space. SAP hopes to expand this type of analytics tool to other schools if they can help supply the stats.
SECOND-SCREEN EXPERIENCE? Duke athletics Exec Dir of Digital Strategy Ryan Craig is leading the project for the school, with help from the Fuqua School of Business. As of now, #DukeMBBstats resides on the GoDuke.com basketball page and it does not have a revenue component. “We’re looking at this as a way to drive fan engagement, page views and just in general to get more fans into our dot-com ecosystem,” Craig said. The new #DukeMBBstats site will be more responsive across mobile and tablets, and the school also has been working to make the information more social-media friendly for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. Craig said he hopes the site will become a second screen for fans during a game or even a sports debate. Craig said among the ways the analytics can be used is to compare teams, players and even common threads among certain groups of players -- either by position or by status, like All-Americans.
