Basketball gets its first AI-powered intelligence hub.
In October 2025, the NBA and Amazon Web Services announced a multi-year partnership making AWS the Official Cloud and Cloud AI Partner of the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, Basketball Africa League, and NBA Take-Two Media. The centrepiece is NBA Inside the Game powered by AWS — a basketball intelligence platform that processes the league's player tracking data (29 data points per player, recorded 60 times per second) using Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. New AI-powered metrics launching in the 2025-26 season include: Defensive Box Score (quantifying individual defensive contributions previously unmeasurable); Shot Difficulty (evaluating shooter orientation, defensive contest, and court positioning); and Gravity (measuring how much defensive attention a player draws without the ball). Play Finder, built on Bedrock and SageMaker, enables instant search and retrieval of similar plays across thousands of games — available to fans via the NBA App and to teams for coaching and front office workflows. The NBA App, NBA.com, and NBA League Pass also migrated to AWS infrastructure. The partnership expands Amazon's existing NBA relationship, which includes Prime Video's 11-year media rights deal. Status: production from 2025-26 season.
Why it matters
The three new metrics — Defensive Box Score, Shot Difficulty, Gravity — are not incremental additions to existing stats; they are attempts to make previously unquantifiable basketball concepts measurable at broadcast speed. Gravity in particular is conceptually significant: it quantifies off-ball value, which is the hardest thing to price in player contracts and the most common source of disagreement between coaches and front offices. If these metrics gain acceptance, they will influence player valuation and contract negotiations, not just broadcast storytelling. The risk is adoption: new metrics require new vocabulary, and broadcast audiences resist complexity. AWS and the NBA are betting that the right interface (real-time alerts for commentators, interactive app features) bridges that gap — but the history of advanced sports analytics suggests it takes a decade, not a season.