San Antonio Spurs select SAS® Analytics to capitalize on player stats

SAS predictive analytics help empower team’s decision makers

CARY, NC - Like most NBA teams, the San Antonio Spurs spend the offseason poring over player statistics to find better ways to run their sport operations. Using SAS Visual Data Discovery from the leader in business analytics software and services, Spurs staff has found an analytics advantage. SAS Visual Data Discovery brings the Spurs advanced analytics and exploratory data analysis with interactive data visualization, leading to better analyses, faster decisions and more effective presentations of analytic results.

“We’re continually working to advance our performance, and analytics are critical to the equation,” said Brian Pauga, the Spurs’ Basketball Operations Assistant. “We relish the single view that SAS provides – pulling data from multiple sources to ease our analysis and reporting.”

SAS Visual Data Discovery’s point-and-click interface to SAS’ advanced analytics overcomes the inherent limitations in spreadsheets, static graphs, charts and tabular reports, providing a non-programming environment for exploratory data analysis.

“SAS is a powerful competitive weapon for teams analyzing player performance with the goal of improving team performance,” said Craig Duncan, Manager of Sports and Entertainment at SAS. ”The challenge is that information can be hard to consolidate and even harder to analyze for useful insights. With game-changing solutions from SAS, organizations like the Spurs are using statistics to create a competitive advantage.”

Jeff Ma, author of “The House Advantage,” agrees. “SAS provides a better way, delivering the most comprehensive analytics that a sport has ever seen,” said Ma, in a conversation with NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West about the importance of sports statistics and letting the numbers guide decisions. Both were frustrated with ways sports teams have used statistics and appreciate seeing teams use their data more effectively.

The San Antonio Spurs are an American professional basketball team. Part of the Southwest Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association, they have won four NBA championships.

About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know®