AI Is the NBA’s Sixth Man Now

The New York Knicks are heading to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. This time, artificial intelligence (AI) has a courtside seat.

The league tracks every player and the ball across all 29 arenas in real time. That data flows into a three-layer infrastructure spanning on-court intelligence, fan-facing content and commercial distribution: the engine behind the sport’s most-watched season in nearly a quarter century.

Every Move, Measured

Last October, the NBA and AWS announced a multi-year partnership called NBA Inside the Game. The platform processes 29 data points per player using machine learning to generate real-time insights available to fans, broadcasters and teams. Three new stats debuted this season: Defensive Box Score, which attributes defensive impact to individual players in real time; Shot Difficulty, which evaluates expected field goal percentage on every attempt based on positioning and defensive pressure; and Gravity, which quantifies how much defensive attention a player draws without the ball. AWS detailed a fourth metric called Leverage Score, built on counterfactual modeling that allocates credit across all ten players on court within seconds of each possession ending.

That infrastructure is now visible in how teams and broadcasters analyze postseason matchups in real time. All 30 teams now have direct access to the machine learning models powering the platform, using the same tracking data for front office and coaching decisions. The depth of analysis available to NBA coaching staffs in 2026 would have been unrecognizable to the coaches of two decades ago.

The Content Layer

What the analytics infrastructure does for front offices, AI-powered content tools are doing for fan reach.

WSC Sports reported that the NBA deployed generative AI to automate voice-over commentary for game highlights in multiple languages across digital platforms. A single English-language highlight becomes a Spanish, Japanese or Arabic one, with voice tones matched to the local market. The multilingual clips carried a 75% completion rate for two-minute videos. The NBA reported that 170 million people in the U.S. watched NBA games across ABC/ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, NBC/Peacock and NBA TV this season — the most in 24 years and up 86% year over year. Front Office Sports found that average viewership per national telecast rose 16% to 1.78 million, the highest in seven years.

Commissioner Adam Silver said the next frontier is hyper-personalization is letting fans experience the game in any format they want.

Commerce Underneath the Court

The infrastructure powering analytics and content also runs through a growing commercial stack. PwC foundthat generative AI is accelerating hyper-tailored fan feeds, predictive insights and personalized highlight experiences as a critical layer of the sports media economy in 2026

Sportradar announced a multi-year agreement with NBC Sports Regional Sports Networks to supply NBA advanced data and its GameFrame AI tool across hundreds of live telecasts, converting player-tracking data into on-air graphics and animated replays in real time.

Amazon’s Prime Video integrated Inside the Game stats directly into live broadcasts under an 11-year media rights deal that began this season, streaming 67 regular-season games globally. Each partnership monetizes the same tracking data the league has collected since 2013.