The Lakers franchise has suffered immeasurably from a scourge of injuries to key players, both young and old, over the last few seasons. During the '14-15 season the Lakers topped the league for the second consecutive year with 339 games lost due to injury. This even surpassed the previous season when the team lost 319 games to injuries.
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However, the cameras are also capable of capturing footage at 25 frames per second, offering extremely granular data on player acceleration and intensity. Teams are able to understand how intense a player's workload is at any point throughout the game using this technology. Teams can locate drop offs in performance and begin to see whether a player is fatigued or being overused.
Wearable devices
Teams across the NBA are utilizing wearable devices that measure player movement and fatigue as well. Catapult Sports is the most widely used vendor in the league, specializing in biomechanical analysis. Catapult has created a small wearable device lined in a compression shirt that can measure the intensity and efficiency at which a player is moving. The wearable device can also measure the direction, speed, and position of an athlete's body at any time.
Zephyr Technology Corp. and Zebra Technologies are two additional vendors servicing various teams throughout the league with biometric data. These wearable devices allow teams to measure the force and impact with which an athlete plays while comparing his biometric levels such as heart rate.
P3 Applied Sports Sciences
Perhaps the most cutting edge company in this field is Santa Barbara based P3 Applied Sports Sciences. P3 employs reflective markers and 3-D motion cameras to capture over 5,000 data points within a player's movement.
This mass of data allows trainers to see how efficient a body is moving and where asymmetric force is being borne on a player's joints or muscles. P3 specializes in taking insights formed from the data and prescribing training regimens and dietary changes to avoid the types of serious or chronic injuries a player is most vulnerable to.
There is clearly a rich bevy of options for teams to access in order to develop an advanced injury prevention program. Many or all of these vendors list teams such as the Spurs, Warriors, and Rockets as clients. In conjunction with feedback directly from players regarding how their body feels, these teams have been successful in using analytics-based information to help prevent injuries. Teams are able to make better decisions regarding when to rest players and how to alter their training practices to minimize risk exposure.
The Lakers on the other hand are not listed as clients of any of these companies nor do their players seem to use any of their devices independently. The Lakers may be developing some sort of performance-based analytics shop in-house, but seem woefully behind the rest of the league on the injury prevention front.
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