There is an unusual apprehension within the Orlando Magic front office these days.
The team’s decision-makers don’t feel as prepared for the upcoming NBA Draft as they would feel in a typical year. Make no mistake, the Magic have done everything they can to reduce the guesswork in evaluating prospects. Exhaustive background research, face-to-face interviews with potential picks and individual player workouts in Orlando are just a bit of the work the team has done.
But the pandemic prevented the Magic from using one of the key tools usually at their disposal: in-person scouting. Scouts and executives could not travel to college games for the vast majority of the 2020-21 college season.
“It’s been very difficult,” said Jeff Weltman, the Magic’s president of basketball operations. “We’ve been limited in our abilities to actually see players in-person, and that’s the lifeblood of all scouting. So largely, we’re behind the eight ball.”
Weltman at least can take solace in two areas. First, the Magic aren’t the only team playing catch-up. The pandemic hindered the other 29 NBA teams from scouting college prospects in person, too.
Orlando also has an advantage that no other franchise has. The Magic have access to artificial intelligence-powered body recognition technology that allows them to collect data about college players’ tendencies, strengths and weaknesses via game broadcasts.
That technology, developed by the company Stats Perform, is called AutoStats. It takes a television broadcast of any college game and tracks the movements of players on the court and the location of the basketball.
All NBA arenas have sophisticated motion-capture cameras in their rafters that track the exact movements of all 10 players and the ball.
