With just over a week until the Toronto Raptors’ home opener, the NBA team unveiled a hulking, 121-by-10-foot multimedia analytics screen at its OVO Athletic Centre practice facility on Tuesday. Tracking action on the court in real time, the Raptors’ coaching staff and players will use it at practices. Here’s what you need to know about the 2019 champions’ new technology:

What it does: 448 LG Electronics display panels span nearly the length of the gym, showing the fruits of 20 cameras and its in-house shot-mapping technology. When a basketball leaves a player’s hands, they’ll both see and hear metrics including the shot’s arc, rotation and depth. It also provides defensive metrics, including tips, blocks and deflections. 

“That’s what the game is moving towards—gamification or analytics. More data is just helping us grow our games,” said Raptors forward Thaddeus Young.

The use of data isn’t new in the game, but with the help of the new jumbotron-like screens, players and coaches can now act on it immediately, head coach Nick Nurse told reporters.

Previously, he said, “[The data] would go into this data bank, we’d have to go find it, pull it off the computer, print it out and show it to a player,” Nurse said. “Everybody’s moving pretty fast around here … so it’s nice to get immediate teaching moments.”

The team behind the tech: It’s the first time an NBA team will be using this kind of real-time visual data in practice settings, Christian Magsisi, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s vice-president of technology and digital, told The Logic.  

The analytics platform, which incorporates a multitude of customized data feeds, was developed by MLSE’s in-house R&D and analytics team of about 20 people, he said. In the future, “you may see some of this technology implemented for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto FC, or the Toronto Argonauts and some of our minor league teams,” Magsisi said.

Balling in the NBA: While Nurse said technology alone might not give an NBA team an edge, he said this latest tool will help the Raptors in another key way. “Maybe the biggest competition is to continue to be innovative. My thing is to be thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’

“I love it that I don’t have to go out there and say, ‘Pass it here,’ ‘Move three steps here,’ ‘Go this way,’ and I can just put it up there,” Nurse said, pointing to the screen. “I think my voice is a finite resource, so it’s good to save it a little bit, especially early in the season.”