There’s a staggering amount of information an NBA coach would have to hold in his head to do his job optimally, a volume that—given the rapidly increasing sophistication of the tools that produce it—likely grew in the time it took you to read this sentence.
Consider this: In 2014, 25 times a second, in every NBA arena, the location of the 10 players on the floor, as well as the ball and the officials, are captured by a network of SportVU motion-tracking cameras, then translated into facts about the game. Additional technologies are poised to add layers of detail to this already rich picture.