A week after reports trickled out that Philadelphia 76ers general manager Daryl Morey is using artificial intelligence to make front-office decisions, his longtime friend and NBA thinker Bill Simmons is ready to position AI as the future of player evaluation in the NBA and beyond.
In the latest episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, the Sports Guy provided insight on how he sees AI becoming the next frontier for personnel decisions in sports.
“I don’t think a lot of people have talked about it, and it’s not AI the way you think,” Simmons said.
“It’s for drafting and scouting. I think there’s going to be all these AI programs that capture demeanor, facial expressions, the way your eyes are, how you stand, just these crazy things that will be like, ‘this guy is more of an alpha because our AI program followed him and tracked him as he walked around a basketball court.’ I think we’re headed toward weird f***ing ‘Minority Report’ s***.”
Simmons sees the current moment in sports as similar to the early 2000s, when quants were first moving up the ranks in front offices. After Michael Lewis spilled the details in his famous book “Moneyball,” the jig was up.
This is the pre-“Moneyball” era for sports executives smart enough to deploy AI to get an edge. In particular, Simmons believes teams will measure emotions and personality traits, biometrics, and physical movement with programs that recognize patterns. If teams determine, with the help of AI, that a player is likely to have longevity or be a good teammate, they may prioritize those players and outclass their rival teams.
“Let’s say I’m thinking about signing somebody who’s been in the league eight years,” Simmons imagined. “And I take all the video of when they were in college and the first two years in the league, of how they moved and how they jumped, and then I’m able to take the video of them last season and have the AI program look and it and be like, ‘what do you see?'”
Morey’s comments were met with ridicule, but Simmons appears to know something we don’t. That is, Morey is either not alone, or his use of AI is genuinely ahead of the curve.
If Simmons is right, executives across all sports should probably stop laughing at Morey and start thinking about how to keep up.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.