MLSE looks to revolutionize sports experience with digital R&D lab

“In the early years here, it felt like we were a startup within MLSE because we didn’t operate, look, act like the rest of the organization,” he says. “We didn’t have software engineers, we didn’t have developers here at MLSE prior to us creating MLSE Digital Labs. Now we have a full-scale R&D program. Those were never concepts or job descriptions that were getting posted from MLSE. In a lot of ways, we felt like outsiders within our own organization, but we knew that was going to be the case, that we could usher in this new culture and organization.”

In the past several years, the amount of real-time data available to the organization has increased tremendously. Soccer, football, and basketball are all making use of computer vision for player and ball tracking that can be used to enhance the fan experience and provide actionable insights to coaches and players in-game. The NHL has gone a step further, embedding sensors in players’ sweaters and the puck itself.

“Getting live, real-time data that is actionable, that can provide insight to how we’re trying to execute our game strategy for that day, for that game, is more readily available to us now,” Magsisi says. “With hockey, we finally have tracking of the puck and the player, the XYZ coordinates of the players and the pucks. With that, there’s an almost infinite possibility of calculations that you can do in hockey that wasn’t available less than 18 months ago.”

This analytics advantage in hockey has yet to be fully realized in MLSE’s other major sports, he adds. “In soccer, football, and basketball, it’s computer vision. Latency has gotten a lot better over time, but the data is still challenging to go through.”

That said, advances in the field of biomechanics related to computer vision have Magsisi excited. Computer vision can currently be used to track the position of players and the ball, but new advances will enable computer vision to track the position of players’ limbs. For example, Magsisi says, the organization could track the trajectory of a ball as it’s released from a basketball player’s hands.

Betting big on the future

The idea behind SportsX is to capture, analyze, and build out the best ideas from key MLSE stakeholders, whether coaches, fans, partners, or employees, and the organization has built a dedicated SportsX web portal to support the effort. The solutions will support how teams play, how players stay healthy, how fans connect with teams and each other, and how franchises operate internally.