Slappin' Glass sits down this week in the next installment of the "Titans" series, with the Co-Founder of one of the fast growing and most innovative basketball analytics companies in the world, HD Intelligence. This episode explores the story, key decisions, and future of analytics with a founder and company helping some of college basketball's best programs find an edge.
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
Slappin' Glass sits down this week in the next installment of the "Titans" series, with the Co-Founder of one of the fast growing and most innovative basketball analytics companies in the world, HD Intelligence. This episode explores the story, key decisions, and future of analytics with a founder and company helping some of college basketball's best programs find an edge.
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
I'm reading about the rise of analytics in the NBA and one of the things that becomes apparent especially the NBA during that time is that analytics were driving a lot of the changes we were seeing on the court and some of the best teams, the most successful teams, were leaning heavily into analytics, were being run by people who were leaning into analytics. Being in college at the time, we'd have pro-skelts come through to watch practice and I'm just picking everyone's brain and what becomes apparent through conversations and reading articles is that these teams have these in-house analytics departments Not just one person but in a lot of cases, five, ten people. It seems like the teams that are innovating and winning are the ones that seem to be leaning into it the most, and I looked around the college landscape and that wasn't happening in college.
Dan Krikorian:Welcome to Titans. A special series here at Slapping Glass exploring the stories, key decisions and innovations of the best companies in basketball and beyond for pushing the game to new heights for coaches, players and fans. Today we're excited to welcome Colton Houston, co-founder of one of the fastest-growing and most innovative performance analytics companies, hd Intelligence. From his early years as a director of operations to his serendipitous connection to a data scientist and future co-founder, matt Dover.
Dan Krikorian:Today's episode explores the story of how a Harvard grad-turned-basketball coach launched a company that has raised the bar for college analytics everywhere, along with what the future of analytics will look like in years to come. Please enjoy our conversation with Colton Houston as March Madness gets set to tip off in 2024,. Many of the field's best men's basketball programs, including the defending national champions, yukon Huskies, have found a helping hand in the realm of in-depth analytics from Colton Houston and his team at HD Intelligence. As the demand for useful analytics has grown over the years, hdi has specialized in helping programs find an edge through highly detailed and customizable data and numbers. We start by diving in with Colton's interesting background and path that helps sow the seeds of what was to come.
Colton Houston:Probably like a lot of stories of ideas or businesses that really grew out of an experience or a need that I saw in my own experience. I used to be a basketball coach, right. So I worked at Alabama with their men's basketball team for nine seasons from 2010 to 2019. And in my time there did a lot of different things on the staff mainly was director of operations, but had a very strong interest in the analytical side of things, and that was really a formative time, I would say, as analytics were becoming more and more a part of the game of basketball at the pro level and at the college level, and it seemed like there was a need for some type of company service tool for coaches to use to help them use analytics to really do a lot of different things, whether it's break down my own game after the fact, scout an upcoming opponent, look at lineups. We do a lot of stuff because there's a lot of ways you can use data and the insights from data to help you do your job as a coach a little bit better. So it grew out of my experience as a coach and really feeling like there was a gap or a need for something like this.
Colton Houston:And then in EGOT Origin Story like luck's always a big part, right.
Colton Houston:So I got really lucky very fortunate in that I'm not a data scientist, I'm not a computer programmer, I'm not a tech-savvy person but just through a friend I got connected with my co-founder, matt Dover.
Colton Houston:We started this together, we run the company together, we're equal partners in this and Matt is a high, high level data scientist with a master's degree from Harvard and a lot of experience doing this at a pretty high level, not a sports realm, but he's an Alabama grad and a huge sports fan and so got connected with Matt. We ended up hiring him to do some projects for us at Alabama, specifically in the scheduling area, which were very successful, and Matt and I really hit it off and I pitched him on the idea. He liked the idea and really took both of us to launch because he's the data science more technical product guy. I'm the basketball guy with sort of the know-how of the industry and the relationships and more of the coach's perspective. So it grew out of that and I was able to convince Matt to kind of leave what he was doing to start this and we launched four and a half years ago and we're still going strong today.
Dan Krikorian:Colton, if I could go back even a little further before we jump now back ahead and ask you, as a Harvard grad yourself, how you got from Harvard to then working in college men's basketball and what was the path there? How?
Colton Houston:long is this podcast? Usually I have a very circuitous route, we'll say. And it's funny. I have an older sister and I always use her as kind of the counter example of someone who knew what they wanted to do from an early age and was laser focused on that. So when she was 13 years old she said I want to be a doctor when I grew up and literally never wavered from that and all three were adolescents young adulthood, college, mad school. She's always known she wanted to be a doctor and she's a very successful doctor. They own her in practice and very happy doing that.
Colton Houston:I wasn't blessed with that level of clarity at such a young age. So I've always had a lot of interests, played a lot of different sports, enjoyed all my subjects in school, was a good student, loved basketball, football, baseball, and took a lot longer to figure out what it is I wanted to do and I had to try a few things out. So I actually studied political science in college, taught and coached at high school for a couple years, worked in their fundraising office as well, and then actually left that job once. You did vanity school, which is where my path really gets unique, but kept kind of one foot in the basketball world, working camps, coaching youth teams there's a lot of stories and connections out of that that. You look back and you're kind of blown away at how things all unfolded but decided in my kind of mid late 20s pretty late that I wanted to get into college coaching. I played a one year at Harvard on their junior varsity team, which didn't really have any connections or meaningful experience from that. So I was really starting from scratch it was probably 2008, 2009 range and really decided I wanted to try to get back into coaching, but this time at the college level and again probably don't have enough time to get into all the doors that opened and closed. And I was married at the time. I was a newly wed and so my wife's kind of like I trust you, but you know we got to figure something out here at some point.
Colton Houston:This is dragging out but ended up having a chance to volunteer at Alabama and coach Anthony Grant was the coach there. He was going into a second season. There was a lot of positive energy and momentum there and I grew up in Alabama and my dad's an alumni group as a fan of the team, so it was a really cool experience for me and just to kind of give you guys one sort of angle here, that whole time in my life. That's pretty interesting. I was told by a couple of division three schools in the area that they did not have a spot for me to come volunteer and help them.
Colton Houston:I felt like I was scraping the bottom of the barrel just trying to get my foot in the door of college coaching. And so I've been told no politely but told no by a couple of division three schools. And then I turned around and have a chance to work camp at Alabama and probably had a desperation kind of give my best sales pitch to coach Grant why he should let me come volunteer for them and eventually I was offered an opportunity to do that. So I really felt like a GA type role there. My first year as a volunteer, married, my wife supported us and it was somewhat of a risk and maybe the risk of doing that I know I'm jumping ahead maybe the risk of doing that maybe more comfortable with the risk of starting a company, you know, nine years later with HDI.
Patrick Carney:Well, you just said there. I always find it interesting with these conversations with founders. When you have the idea, you hit on with maybe how you value risk or how you assess risk, but from taking the idea and putting it into action, and when you were convincing your co-founder, matt Dover, to join you, what was from your past experience that said this is a good idea, let's do it.
Colton Houston:I think for me, you know, matt had to be on board, right, and I had to be on board and for me, kind of as the person who initially had the now Matt probably done more than I have in terms of making the idea a reality, but just in terms of that initial grain of an idea, as the person who had that and who was able to flesh it out and I had some good friends I was working with at Alabama. They probably thought I was crazy. I was like, guys, I have this idea, just hear me out, you know what if and we could do this and we could do that, and they're kind of like, sure, man, sounds good. But I think it was easier, obviously for me to make that commitment, with it being my idea and feeling strongly about it. And, honestly, having sat in the seat of a coach and seen our coaching staff go through their day to day grind of recruiting, scheduling games, preseason practice, scouting, report like game prep, breaking the film and the stats down after the game, showing up at practice being in that profession for nine years, you know I felt very confident that the product that I had in my head and that Matt and I began to sort of actually bring to fruition. I felt very confident that product would be useful and valuable to coaches.
Colton Houston:But I had to convince Matt, who hadn't been in those locker rooms, in those coaches offices. But you know, one of the things that made that, I think, conversation or that convincing was I was able to say look, first of all, I'm leaving a pretty good situation here and I built up some equity in the industry nine years in to do this. So, like I'm putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak, right. And I think he saw that and trusted me and we'd known each other a couple years at that point.
Colton Houston:But it was also, I think, you have to view the risk through the appropriate lens and I had to say for myself and Matt had to have this own conversation with himself was what's the worst that could happen? You know, we weren't seeking outside investment, we weren't taking on a bunch of debt or anything to do this. So the risk was hey, it fails, we move on to something else. Matt's a smart guy with plenty of connections and skills. I was like, look, if this doesn't work, I'll go find something else won't be the end of the world. So I think, really just doing the risk appropriately for us probably helped with that as well. But I would say year one you never know any type of startup. You don't know till you get in. So there were definitely some nerves and some wondering, especially once we launched and we had zero clients. It's like now we actually have to go out and convince people to pay us to do this. Once you get some wins under your belt and some momentum there, you start to breathe a little easier.
Dan Krikorian:I still remember the very first sale Pat and I ever had for our SG plus membership and seeing that come through and the relief, the joy of that first sale. And for you guys you just mentioned, you had the company you started and then getting that first client in the door and the process doing that I guess who that was, if you're able to say it and the process to getting there.
Colton Houston:Yeah, I remember our first client that said yes. I also remember the first time a check arrived in the mail and just looking at it and shaking my head I guess this is real, Someone actually sent me a check. But in our first season we had four clients and three high major schools Dayton and Cincinnati and Alabama all jumped on board kind of mid-summer I would say. But Cincinnati was the first one. I had relationships with all three of those staffs already for my time in Alabama. So Alabama had a new coach in Nate Oates but a couple of the guys on that staff had stayed back. That I knew. I knew the administration athletic department there so I was able to get in there. And then two guys I worked for at Alabama Anthony Granat, dayton and John Brandon at Cincinnati were head coaches. So the relationship piece made it a lot easier.
Colton Houston:But when Cincinnati said, hey, we're doing it, send over the paperwork, I'm like I don't have any paperwork.
Colton Houston:I guess I need to write up some paperwork. You know it's one thing you realize with the startup is a lot of things you do you're doing for the first time and you just sort of build the plane as you fly it. To some degree we're a little bit out of that phase now, thankfully, but definitely feels like we're still in that mode sometimes. But no, I remember Cincinnati and Coach Brandon saying they wanted to work with us and then I just don't remember the order after that probably Alabama, then maybe Dayton. So we had three higher level, higher major, higher profile programs and then then Carnot Word down in Texas out of buddy was coaching there and this was our first year. So we had these two different packages. We were offering kind of a high major tailored package that you know where we would do a lot for you we call this our full service package and then a less expensive package that was tailored more to low majors and that's the one that Incarnate words signed up for so that they were the last one to jump on board there.
Dan Krikorian:But you remember those early days very vividly right, a lot of emotional capital being spent at that point in time, and, colton, maybe this is a good time to Dive into what it is that you all actually do. And I go back to something said at the beginning, which was you know people that we trust, saying that you guys are the best in the industry at what you do and helping you know, take numbers and produce wins. On the other side, I know that you had Yukon Huskies last year as they ran to the national title also Miami as well, and so we'd love to now get into what it is that you saw back when you first started and what you do now that differentiates yourself and really helps these teams produce what they're hoping to on the floor.
Colton Houston:Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to talk about, of what we do, what makes us different, how we help teams. So happy to get into that, and I think I'll just start with again my time working as a staff member at Alabama, seeing what data and analytics were available out there, trying to make them the best use of those to help our staff prepare To play opponents or look at post game breakdowns. But at the same time, I'm Reading about the rise of analytics in the NBA, and this is when the Golden State Warriors are beginning to build there what would become their dynasty, and Darryl Morris with the Houston Rockets are doing things a different way, and the pace in the league and the number of three-point attempts all this stuff is changing and I'm reading everything I can get my hands on, and one of the things that becomes apparent if you follow basketball, and especially the NBA in that during that time is that Analytics were driving a lot of the changes we were seeing on the court and some of the best teams, the most Successful teams, were leaning heavily into analytics, were being run by people who were leaning into analytics. I've never worked in the NBA, so I don't want to claim that I'm an insider but just being in college at the time We'd have pro-skelts come through to watch practice and I'm just picking everyone's brain and what becomes apparent through Conversations and reading articles is that these teams have these in-house analytics departments Not just one person but in a lot of cases five, ten people.
Colton Houston:It seems like the teams that are innovating and winning are the ones that seem to be leaning into it the most, and I looked around the college Landscape and that wasn't happening in college. There were probably a lot of other people like me. Maybe they're in a director of operations position or video coordinator position, ga Assistant coach maybe you had a handful of head coaches who were highly analytical, but really the closest college was getting to that it was that there's maybe one person on staff who Checked the Ken Palm every day or lived in synergy and was taking a bunch of data and then trying to figure out how can we take this data and move the needle competitively for our team. So that's really the framework out of which HDI grew, and so what we do now to really answer your question there, dan is we help coaches collect, interpret and apply data and insights from data to gain a competitive advantage, and we're really trying to Replicate the model of what NBA teams are doing in-house.
Colton Houston:I am painting with a broad brush there. They're 30 NBA teams. They all do it differently. Some do it with a big staff, some do it with a small staff. You know there's relationship between the front office and the coaches. There's 30 different situations, but in general, what they have in common is there's an internal analytics department. By the way, the average NBA team spends $750,000 a year on analytics and that data is a couple years old. It's probably gone up since then that they're highly invested and that's not because it doesn't help. It's obviously a powerful tool.
Colton Houston:So what we do at HDI is we try to provide that level of service, that level of impact to college programs. So when they hire us, we want them to do two things, really three things. We want them to use better data. We provide a lot of that. Some of it is proprietary to us. A lot of, I think, our value there is the way we present the data. Matt, my partner, is an excellent data visualization specialist, so the way the data is presented and digested makes a huge difference in how impactful it can be. We want them to use better data. We also want them to use data better, and that's where the interpretation comes in.
Colton Houston:So I would say one of our key distinctives is we do not think of ourselves as primarily a data delivery service. There are a lot of companies in the analytic space that are data delivery services. A lot of them are really good and really valuable companies, but we think of ourselves primarily as that trusted consultant who helps coaches make sense of the numbers, draw out the key insights and then get to that practical application. And that's where the relationship piece comes in and that's where everything we do whether it's an opponent's scouting report, a breakdown of a team's lineups, analysis of potential transfer teams looking at there's sort of that written analysis and that kind of practical application piece that we put in. I do think we're unique in that regard. We're analytics consultants first and foremost, not data delivery providers.
Patrick Carney:I'd like to hit on just how you think about presenting data for the coaches. You were nice enough, you shared some of the scouting reports and stuff with us and I think it's really unique, and I'd just like to hear what you guys thought about when it was some of your initial conversations of building the business but how you want to actually present data to these coaches.
Colton Houston:Matt and I were always working together and it was incredibly valuable to have that partner, that other set of eyes and that other brain and that sounding board and that different perspective. But I was coming from the perspective of a coach and with our opponent's scouting report, with our post game report, we call it an HD box score. I was at Alabama at the time. So I'm thinking, hey, my role now, the coaches I work with now, what would I like to get? What doesn't exist? But if it did exist I would really use it and find it valuable. So I was coming at it from that perspective and had some things in mind. And then Matt's coming at it from his perspective as a data scientist and as someone who's done a lot of data visualization. That's one of his strengths. And so we're having conversations, we're iterating through different potential versions of these reports and I probably sketch some stuff on the back of piece of paper.
Colton Houston:Matt put something together with his fancy software and I don't think anything that we send to our clients now is like the first version. It's like a lot of things. We work through it and even the first year and the second year, the reports we were sending out they don't look like the reports sending out now, because we're able to get feedback from our clients, and a big thing for us again, in terms of kind of core values and identity, is to continue to evolve, and some of that is like make our products better. There have been pages of our opponent's scouting report that we've eliminated that to really streamline the process. There have been pages that we've added. There have been pages we've redesigned. One thing we started doing this past year is, at the end of the season, surveying our coaches, giving them to give us meaningful feedback in terms of the products and what they use and what suggestions they have. And anything you can get from your clients, from your users, is gold right and then we can work that end to hopefully make those products better.
Patrick Carney:If I can just follow up maybe on what was maybe some of the early feedback you've got in terms of changes you made and again how you kind of presented data or data how they wanted to view post scouting reports, all that stuff.
Colton Houston:I think a challenge we've always dealt with and we probably always will deal with is the fact that not all coaches are the same. You have just as much variety and diversity among these coaches as you would just out in the general public, and so some coaches are highly analytical and probably some of our early adopters and users were coaches that fell into that category, and so we could not give them too much data. Right, we could have a long scouting report with lots of charts and graphs and numbers. Now, as we grew, we probably picked some of that low hanging fruit in terms of finding the highly analytical coaches who were. We've had coaches say I've been waiting for a company like this to come along, right, like you guys. I'm so glad you guys exist. I've had this idea, I've had this thought and now you exist and, to be frank, those are kind of easy cells and those coaches are usually super users of what we do. But we also we pride ourselves in being able to work with any coach and provide value to any coach. We don't want to be just something that you know the highly analytical types can find value in. So some of the feedback we've probably gotten more recently is can we streamline this. Can there be a version of this that focuses more on the practical takeaways with less of the data? And so we've.
Colton Houston:I think we've done a good job in navigating that, because you think about our client base we have over 90 schools and D1 basketball we work with. Each staff has five or six people. You're talking about 500, probably closer to 600, 700 users, thinking about all the coaches on all these staffs that are using our stuff, and so we can change our products a little bit from school to school, but for the most part, there's a lot of commonality and a lot of overlap with what they're all getting. So how do you create something that is moving the needle for that highly analytical can't get enough of the data coach and also the coach that says they don't believe in analytics, but actually they're going to look at the numbers just like everybody else, but they just need something that's very practical and very user friendly for them. I don't know that. It's something we figured out. I think we do a good job of navigating those waters, but it's always a challenge.
Dan Krikorian:I actually like to go back real fast to something you said, which was getting better data for coaches to look at, and I guess maybe dive in for a second on what you mean by that and where that better data comes from. Like you mentioned different sources that you use to get your data, but then also some of your own, and, when you present data, how you make it better and where you get it from so that the coaches are getting a better, accurate picture.
Colton Houston:It's an excellent question, because the data is the foundation of everything we do the quality, the reliability of that data. Is there new data? These are all questions that we're continuing to ask, because all of our reports, all of our insights, are based on the data itself, right? So one thing that struck me as I worked at Alabama I didn't play college basketball in a meaningful way, I wasn't a manager, so I was not familiar with the inner workings of a program. I was very green. When I started there. I watched our video department evolve and change rapidly and improve significantly. When I started we were using DVDs and exchanging literal DVDs and cutting and burning DVDs for film, and we went fully digital. Then we upgraded to really good software where you could live, tag and cut and sort and do all kinds of cool stuff really quickly. And then we moved from kind of standard depth to high depth footage, which made a huge difference, and just in the span of nine years we probably had four or five significant improvements with our video platform and our video operation that allowed us to do our jobs better.
Colton Houston:To me, all coaches are going to look at data stats the word they use in film when they're getting ready for a game, or breaking down a game, or scouting a player. I've never met a coach that doesn't look at those two things. And so I'm sitting here watching the video piece of what we do evolve rapidly, which I think is pretty typical of how things worked in college basketball. But the data piece, the stats piece, was like it was frozen in time. No change there. Looking at the same box score that coaches used 50 years ago, that same one black and white sheet of paper, when coaches are preparing for a game, they just get an SID usually a full season box score for that team stats and just outside of shooting percentages, nothing's a rate, nothing's tempo free, nothing's advanced. And I'm sitting here and I know there's other tools out there. I'm going to Ken Palm every day and seeing the tempo free opponent adjusted rate stats that aren't that complex but that he's provided that are much more helpful, in my opinion, than what our coaches are getting.
Colton Houston:All that to say that really, when we talk about using better data with our clients, a big piece of that is taking what's already publicly available, or what's already maybe not publicly available but available to them, and giving it to them in a much more user friendly format.
Colton Houston:We build not everything we do, but some of what we do on the official game data. So what I'm talking about? The box score stats, the play by play, which is a very kind of underutilized resource or source of data from the game, and then the shot location, which is now collected for every shot that's taken. There's a lot you can get out of that data, but it's not provided to the coaches in any type of user friendly format. A lot of them don't even know they have access to all that. A lot of them may see it for their team, but they don't know how to get it for their upcoming opponent. So can we take that and present it to the coach in a way that's giving them more than they're currently getting, that's user friendly, and in a way where we can help them draw out the right insights and application?
Patrick Carney:You mentioned a couple of times presenting it to them in a user friendly format. Could you just give me an example of what that may look like or what you're referring to there?
Colton Houston:Sure, this is a principle that holds true outside of basketball analytics, outside of sports. This is just. I think true in general is that you can take information the same information and present it in two different ways. That might drastically impact how well it's being received and used. So for us, some basic principles that probably Matt has picked up along the way, because this is an area where he's experienced it and really good. Some of those basic principles would be don't put too much information on one page.
Colton Houston:Graphics are important, so we use jerseys and courts that look exactly like the jerseys and courts that teams have in college basketball. We use players' faces right. We have to put time into getting those design and getting those crops and getting those in the right format and integrating that with our stuff. The types of graphs and charts you pick so pie graphs versus bar graphs and again, I'm really, really indebted to Matt because he's really good at this stuff. I might have an idea what something could look like. He goes back in his lab, as we'll say, and kind of cooks it up and brings it out. That looks way better than I ever could have imagined.
Colton Houston:And I also want to give a shout out to our product team. In first year, too, it was just me and Matt doing all this, and now we have three full-time product specialists that report to Matt but do a lot of this stuff on their own. They're really good at it as well. Another example would be and this sounds really elementary, but it's color coding things we do a lot of red, yellow, green, so you get a page of numbers let's say it's a post game report with stats of how your team played. Okay, that's great. If you just go through and you color code those stats green for areas where you performed well and then red for areas where you struggled it makes a world of difference for the usability, the utility from the coach's standpoint.
Patrick Carney:One other question with gathering getting better data, but then now the interpretation piece. I'd like to just ask a question about sample size. With the NBA, you know they had 80 plus, maybe sometimes a hundred, so they're getting larger sample size. But in college, teams are playing, you know, maybe 30, 35 games, and so how do you guys account for when it comes to maybe interpreting this data, like what's a trend, what's an outlier and what information to disseminate to your coaches or your teams?
Colton Houston:It's a significant concern and really it's something that we have to educate our teams on, because we don't want to take one game and a player shot he was 0 for 3 from 3 in one game. Well, he can't shoot, that's 0%. Common sense tells you that sample size is too small to make a judgment right. But beyond that common sense, again, matt and our product team, because this is their area of expertise, can really say our level of certainty is X based on the sample size being Y size, and so that is something that we have to train our coaches on. A big piece of that is because we're not just giving coaches data, we're helping them interpret and apply. We will say, hey, through five games, this team is struggling from three they're shooting 25%. But this same roster last year, which has a lot of continuity this year, shot 35% last year, like pointing those things out. So I'll give you one example right now of a team that I work with directly.
Colton Houston:I won't name the team, but they're off to a good start. Their offense is forming really well and I'm sending them a report on their first. I think it's like eight games. They're shooting like 42% from three, which is great. They have a couple of really good shooters and they expected that to be a strength. It's still a small sample size and so I'm calling out for them that hey, we're playing to the level offensively we want to play. We help them establish a goal in the preseason of being a top whatever offense in the country. They're meeting that goal.
Colton Houston:But the main driver of that is their high volume and really high efficient from three. What I called out for them is guys, only one team in the country shot better than 40% from three last year. So more likely than not, this level of three point efficiency is not sustainable and when or if that number comes back down to earth a little bit, our overall offensive efficiency will decrease. So in order to sustain the level we're playing at right now overall on offense, we need to think about what are we gonna do a little bit better? Where can we improve? Sort of balance out what I would say I hope I'm wrong here, but what I would say is sort of the inevitable regression of their three point efficiency. So then we talk through different areas on offense Sample size is a huge piece of it kind of constantly keeping that in the back of our minds.
Patrick Carney:Cole, you said something interesting with working with that team and you set some goals. I know there are some commonalities among elite offenses and elite defenses and what in terms of maybe stats teams should be thinking about.
Colton Houston:You guys are asking an excellent questions. We get that a lot from coaches, I would say. On the defense event, it's a little easier to answer. We've done some work on this fairly recently and one of the commonalities among elite defenses is the ability to limit both volume and efficiency of shots at the rim. So there's gonna be exceptions to everything. There's probably a couple of teams out there that are really good defensively who maybe aren't as strong there, but when we ran the analysis that was really clear on the defensive end of the floor.
Colton Houston:On the offensive end of the floor, you probably have a little more diversity in terms of the way teams play. There are teams that can be really good offensively, who don't necessarily take a lot of threes, who don't get a lot of offensive rebounds. I do think that turnovers you can have a close to average turnover rate. You can't be a great offense with a high turnover rate and I don't know how much we wanna nerd out on the best point of analytics here. But you think about the four factors right Effective field goal percentage, turnover rate, offensive rebound rate, free throw rate.
Colton Houston:That effective field goal percentage really is the result of a lot of other stats in terms of different types of shots, shot selection efficiency from different levels. So effective field goal percentage is really the amalgamation of six or seven other stats, whereas turnover rate, offensive rebound rate, free throw rate are more sort of pure measuring. One thing type of stats On the offensive end of the floor, that turnover rate it needs to be fairly low if you're gonna have an elite offense. Again, on the defensive end, the commonality we found is ability to limit both volume and efficiency, or in some cases maybe one or the other. But you have to find a way to slow down teams scoring at the rim. If you're giving up a lot of baskets at the rim, you're not gonna be an excellent defense.
Dan Krikorian:I wanted to turn to the future of HDI and, I guess, the future of what you all do within, where you see maybe analytics trending as well as far as how you work with teams and what they're wanting and anything from your standpoint as a company. As we kind of move forward, we think about this all the time.
Colton Houston:We're fortunate. Five years in now. You know we've grown and we have a number of clients that we work with. Many have been with us for a number of years now, but the space is rapidly evolving. It really is, and one of the things that we're excited about is feel like we've kind of established our brand and our relationships with our clients and we're pretty good at what we do. But again, I think I mentioned this earlier, but one of our core values is continuing to evolve and so we've touched on some of this already.
Colton Houston:But part of that is the products we offer. Can we make this report a little better? Can we Think about the way that we build relationships and service our clients better? Because we're obviously remote, right we don't have an office on the 90 campuses where our teams are right, so we're trying to service them as remote de facto staff members. So thinking about how to do that better, how to communicate better. The data piece is huge here.
Colton Houston:So, as we move forward, one thing that is really already happening for us Is that there is more data that is now available for college basketball games than there was two years ago, and probably the most exciting new development there is player tracking data or a fairly accurate facsimile of player tracking data becoming available. It's still in the early stages, it's not available for every team, it's pretty labor-intensive to get that data, but we've partnered with some other companies who are Really, for the first time, able to provide that to us and that opens up whole new world of possibilities with, we call it, 11-point tracking data five players from one team, five players from the other team in the ball like knowing where those 11 different points on the court are, if you will, opens up, man, a world of possibilities in terms of what we can do, because the NBA's had these second spectrum and other companies who they've worked with. They're they've partnered with those companies. They've had player tracking data for a number of years now, and so do are some of our relationships with folks on that level. You know we kind of already have an idea of the products we can build out and this isn't something we publicly talked about. So I guess I'm breaking this on your podcast, but we're beta testing with a couple teams right now. I want to name the teams. We're beta testing our player tracking data products this year and the goal is to roll that out on a wider scale next year.
Colton Houston:The challenge with that has honestly been thinking about what do we do with this data and what do we not do with this data, because there's so much you can do Knowing where everyone is at any given moment on the court. Some of the obvious applications would be how close is the nearest defender on a shot? That's data that up till now we didn't have, which is massively important on a number of different levels right or spacing, or how all teams are guarding a ball screen. What type of defense is this team playing? There's a lot there.
Colton Houston:So for us, moving forward, we feel like we have a lot of respect for other companies out there. We really kind of keep our heads down to focus on ourselves and being the best we can be. We feel like we've established ourselves as sort of the leader in this space for college basketball analytics and in the role that we're in. But the only way we maintain that, the only way we continue to grow, is that continued evolution. So it's Relationships, it's making our existing products better, and then I think the big one for us right now that we're really excited about is what new products Can we roll out? It's exciting.
Patrick Carney:Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit slapping glass comm for more information on the free newsletter slapping glass plus and much more. Have a great week coaching and we'll see you next time on slapping glass.
Dan Krikorian:Would we have a name yet for this thing? I have like slapping back for Slapping glass. Slapping glass, that's kind of funny. I like that. Let's roll slapping glass.