Giannis Antetokounmpo and the league-leading Milwaukee Bucks face LeBron James and the playoff-chasing Los Angeles Lakers for the first time tonight (10:30 p.m. ET, ESPN). In addition to the traditional game telecast, ESPN3 and the ESPN App will provide a second viewing option to watch the NBA All-Star captains and their teams.
Besides looking at the screengrabs below, visit ESPN.com to see highlights of Coach Mode, Player Mode and Mascot Mode as they were applied to the Feb. 27 Lakers-Pelicans game in a test run.
Full Court Press, using Second Spectrum technology, will make its debut, allowing viewers to witness explosive visual affects caused by a powerful Giannis dunk, or fans can track LeBron’s dominant stats line throughout the game, as just a couple of examples.
How it works:
Second Spectrum’s artificial intelligence (AI) pipeline automatically understands the game in the language of professional coaches and creates graphics specific to the action on the court in near-real time. This machine understanding allows coaches and broadcasters to ask virtually any question about the game of basketball in the language of the game and process an enormous quantity of data, precisely cut video and visualizations.
There is currently a two-minute delay between the standard broadcast and the Full Court Press view, however, Second Spectrum plans to reduce the two-minute processing time significantly in the upcoming months.
Tim Corrigan, ESPN senior coordinating producer: “We’ve covered the NBA for 17 years and we have never been more excited to push the envelope and appeal to a larger audience through innovation than we are now. We’re thrilled to have a talented group of commentators (Adam Amin, Zach Lowe, Kirk Goldsberry, and Tom Thibodeau), whose resumes speak for themselves, to walk fans through this basketball viewing experience.”
See examples of each Full Court Press mode below.
Coach mode: a heavy X’s and O’s analytical presentation of the game, featuring on-court diagrams of the live action.
Player mode: featuring above-the-rim cameras and graphics displaying the scoring probability of all five offensive players on the court throughout each possession, changing in real time.
Mascot mode: a fun, entertaining presentation featuring special graphic treatments, including a fire graphic on the basket when a team goes on a scoring run, a 3D on-screen brick if a player misses badly, and more.
