Some people will tell you that the Golden State Warriors are the future of basketball — a migration towards overlapping skill sets, a dozen similar 6-foot-8ish frames playing multiple positions, all switchy and, most importantly, twitchy from behind the 3-point line. This narrative hypothetical has been well-circulated — that we’re moving towards a version of basketball defined by a few unicorns and a surplus of redundantly versatile supporting players.
But what if the future of basketball doesn’t include players at all?
At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at the end of February, researches Thomas Seidl and Aditya Cherukumudi presented a paper called Bhostgusters: Realtime Interactive Play Sketching With Synthesized NBA Defenses. The abbreviated summary is that they have developed an app which would allow an NBA coach to sketch a play on their tablet and then receive an animated estimation of how the defense would respond, taking into account the spatial tendencies of the specific defense as well as the players on the floor, defensive roles, the players’ foul trouble and potential fatigue based on minutes played, as well as the time and score. The program also returns an expected value for the offensive play the coach has drawn, given the projected defensive response.
