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Microsoft Media and Entertainment United States

National Basketball Association

Application Refactoring · Real-time Analytics · Sales Automation

The NBA Stats Team wanted to explore how AI could help them process data on all on-court players’ specific live body movements, analyzing things like speed, dunk height, number of passes and dribbles, and even injury risk, simultaneously.

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For example, McKee cites Steph Curry’s game-clenching shot against Boston on December 19, 2023, that had a release time of 0.367 seconds and peaked at 19 feet and one inch above the floor—making it exceptionally high arcing.
With its electrifying pace, world-class athletes, and compelling on-court storylines and rivalries, it’s no wonder that professional basketball boasts a wildly diverse fan base and is one of the world’s most watched sports. In fact, the 2023–24 National Basketball Association (NBA) Regular Season—across ABC/ESPN/TNT/NBA TV—was consumed for a total of 762.69 million hours, making it the most-consumed NBA Regular Season in five years.

Reported impact

Business outcome

NBA players are improving performance with AI on Azure AI infrastructure

  • Cost Reduction
  • Productivity Improvement
  • Risk Reduction
  • Scalability

Solution

National Basketball Association, a Media and Entertainment organization in United States, modernized this application refactoring workload with Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service, SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Virtual Machines. The NBA Stats Team wanted to explore how AI could help them process data on all on-court players’ specific live body movements, analyzing things like speed, dunk height, number of passes and dribbles, and even injury risk, simultaneously. Azure provides the scalable cloud foundation hosting the customer’s modernized applications, data, and AI workloads. Azure Kubernetes Service runs the containerized services and data-processing workloads that need elastic compute at scale. SQL Server stores and serves relational business data needed by the application workflow. Processes up to 16 gigabytes of raw player-tracking data per game on AKS-based infrastructure.

Data flow

Data from operational systems is ingested into Azure, processed across Azure Kubernetes Service, and surfaced through SQL Server so teams can act on fresher operational insight.

Solution architecture

5 components · 2 layers
  1. Compute
    • Azure provides the scalable cloud foundation hosting the customer’s modernized applications, data, and AI workloads.
    • Azure Kubernetes Service runs the containerized services and data-processing workloads that need elastic compute at scale.
    • Azure Virtual Machines runs application or database workloads that need infrastructure-level control in Azure.
  2. Storage
    • SQL Server stores and serves relational business data needed by the application workflow.
    • Azure Cosmos DB stores globally distributed application data with low-latency access for digital services.

Architecture clues

  • Processes up to 16 gigabytes of raw player-tracking data per game on AKS-based infrastructure.

Evidence from the source

Microsoft SQL Server
NBA players are improving performance with AI on Azure AI infrastructure
The NBA Stats Team wanted to explore how AI could help them process data on all on-court players’ specific live body movements, analyzing things like speed, dunk height, number of passes and dribbles, and even injury risk, simultaneously.
The NBA Stats Team wanted to explore how AI could help them process data on all on-court players’ specific live body movements, analyzing things like speed, dunk height, number of passes and dribbles, and even injury risk, simultaneously. The team built a Microsoft Azure solution based on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that can manage and process up to 16 gigabytes of raw data per game, not including RGB video signals—sometimes more if the game goes into overtime. The new solution is deployed and operational, and the data being collected is already helping the NBA better understand players’ strengths and weaknesses and improve their performance. The NBA aims to use Azure AI infrastructure to continue to build new learning models and support statistic overlays on viewer screens as they happen on-court.
With its electrifying pace, world-class athletes, and compelling on-court storylines and rivalries, it’s no wonder that professional basketball boasts a wildly diverse fan base and is one of the world’s most watched sports. In fact, the 2023–24 National Basketball Association (NBA) Regular Season—across ABC/ESPN/TNT/NBA TV—was consumed for a total of 762.69 million hours, making it the most-consumed NBA Regular Season in five years.
Transparency Evidence & methodology 91/100 reference value · 87% confidence · 1 source

Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.

01

Scoring methodology

How scores are calculated

Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.

Customer reference value91/100
  • Problem clarity20/20
    Measures whether the customer's operational problem is specific enough to compare.
  • Implementation depth20/25
    Rewards named components, data flow, integrations, and architecture detail.
  • Outcome specificity16/20
    Measures whether the reported benefit is concrete rather than a generic claim.
  • Quantified impact25/25
    2 metrics describe measurable impact.
  • Deployment scale10/10
    Rewards evidence of a live or scaled deployment and meaningful integration scope.
Evidence confidence87%
  • Source authority20/25
    The main evidence is an official vendor-published customer story.
  • Claim traceability21/25
    10 of 12 key fields link to a named source.
  • Direct evidence20/20
    5 direct source quotes retained.
  • Date provenance10/10
    The publication date comes from the source page or publisher.
  • Source transparency8/10
    1 source reference document publisher, URL, authority, retrieval, and supported fields.
  • Implementation specificity8/10
    Rewards source-backed components, data flow, quantified impact, and a specific outcome.
02

Traceability

Sources & provenance

Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.

  1. Microsoft

    National Basketball Association customer story

    First-party
    https://www.microsoft.com/en/customers/story/1769559716293357869-nba-azure-kubernetes-service-media-and-entertainment-en-united-states
    Source type
    Vendor-published customer story
    Published
    May 17, 2024
    Supports
    • Customer
    • Business problem
    • Solution
    • Products
    • Solution components
    • Data flow
    • Integrations
    • technical area
    • use case category
    • Business outcome
    • outcome category
    • Metrics
    • Architecture
    • evidence quotes
    • Publication date

Date evidence

  • Published on source page May 17, 2024 · Microsoft · First-party
    Open date source
Not separately sourced Industry, Region, Company size. Treat these normalized attributes as lower-confidence until a dedicated source is added.

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