NHL commissioner Gary Bettman speaks on a panel during the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. (Photo by Patrick Daly / ESPN Images)
The Denver Broncos have been using Catapult’s wearable technology since 2014, but running back C.J. Anderson said he only gained access to his data this past fall — and had a career-high 1,007 rushing yards, saying, “I believe I had a better year on the football field because of the data that I have.”
While speaking on a technology panel at last week’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Anderson said that, as helpful as the tracking data was to him on the field, it might not be so beneficial when shared with team executives.
“Now if I walk into [general manager] John Elway’s office and say, ‘Hey Elway, A-B-C,’ but he says, ‘X-Y-Z,’ I might not get paid as much as I would like or as much as I think I should be getting paid because he can use that data of the issues and the problems that I have. ‘This is why I don’t want to pay you,’ or ‘this is why I’m getting rid of you, this is why you’re getting waived, this is why you’re getting traded.’
“I think that will be the fear in our business will be the negotiation side of things. It’s already cutthroat.”
Even seemingly straightforward measurements, like a hockey player’s skating speed, may have layers of complexity. As Don Fehr, the executive director of the National Hockey League Players Association, explained on a player advocacy panel, context matters.
“There’s this big push to quantify everything without, as of yet, knowing what those quantities mean,” he said. “So we can say you skated a little bit slower than you did three years ago, does that mean your play is better or worse? Are you taking time to figure out where you’re going or can you not keep up any more?
“So there’s a real danger in negotiations of having a lot of statistics that merely provide excuses for people to do what they want to do.”
Therein remains the thorny nature of the proliferation of wearable data and how that information will be applied in professional sports. Some leagues have begun addressing the issue in their respective collective bargaining agreements, with voluntary participation a cornerstone of each policy, except the NFL that mandates players wearing the Zebra tracking chip in their shoulder pads during games. The NBA has banned the data from contract negotiations or player transactions. Major League Baseball prohibits the data from use in salary arbitration discussions. The NHL’s CBA, finalized in 2013, does not explicitly address the issue, which will become more pressing given the league’s stated desire to have league-wide tracking within two years. “Anything that can help grow the game,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said.
The NBA is forming a committee to further explore the issue, but National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts was clear that player privacy was paramount in their conversations.
“We caution the players about how, if at all, they should be disclosing this information,” she said. “Efficacy, validation — those things are important to us. We don’t know if some of this stuff is, frankly, junk. And we certainly don’t want it to have it be the source of or be used in contract negotiations. Maintaining control of the data has been our primary focus.”
That echoes the refrain of NFL Players Inc. president Ahmad Nassar who, when speaking at SportTechie’s State of the Industry event last month, said player ownership of data was the “central bedrock starting point” of his group’s partnership conversation with Whoop.
Recently retired MLB pitcher Chris Capuano shared the prevailing opinion of his peers, when he explained, “I guess their fear is, ‘How is this data going to be used against me?’” Baseball already has an external radar- and camera-based tracking system, Statcast, that measures players’ movements on the field.
Generally, such external tracking information and other movement data is seen as less circumspect as the biometric wearables that glean heart rate and other such metrics.
“The way I look at it is two different buckets of wearable technology,” said longtime NBA agent Jim Tanner, whose client list has included Tim Duncan, Grant Hill and Ray Allen. “The first is the movement tracking — acceleration, deceleration, load, things like that. That doesn’t concern me as much as the biometric stuff where they’re analyzing the oxygen in your blood or the recovery rates or things like that where, to me, that’s very personal to the player.”
Indeed, that is about the only consensus on the issue: players, agents and unions all believe the athletes should own and control their own data. What shape tracking technology takes in the years to come — whether it’s personally worn or externally collected — will steer the direction of the conversation, along with the implications that can be definitively drawn.
“Obviously this is the new hot fad, and it’s going to be out there,” Fehr said. “Whether it’ll be around in any meaningful fashion five or 10 years from now, I think, is anybody’s guess.”
