NBA Team: Transforming Basketball Operations with AI-Powered Intelligence

The Challenge

Manual coordination was consuming basketball operations capacity at an alarming rate. Scheduling alone - coordinating Performance, Coaching, and Scouting team calendars - ate up hundreds of hours monthly. Staff also spent large amounts of time creating reports and general information sharing. Scouts were writing thousands of reports annually by hand, while also spending significant effort manually coordinating travel across NBA, G League, college, and international games.

In addition, despite having abundant data across multiple systems, the organization struggled to extract actionable insights quickly enough to support time-sensitive decisions.

"There are moments where your brain is fried and you've written 700 reports... It's just tedious work"

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Our Approach

Morningside conducted a rapid one-week discovery sprint, assessing all 12 basketball operations departments through 21 in-depth interviews with leaders and frontline staff plus almost 70 survey responses capturing workflow pain points and time burdens.

Our team mapped operational bottlenecks across Coaching, Performance, Scouting, and Front Office functions, then surfaced 8 high-impact AI opportunities and pressure-tested them with department heads to ensure alignment with basketball priorities.

The deliverable was thorough AI optimization roadmap with multiple functioning proof-of-concept applications. The roadmap showed 3-4 week implementation timelines for each solution—quick enough to deploy mid-season, comprehensive enough to drive lasting transformation.

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Outcomes & Impact

The assessment surfaced 8 distinct AI opportunities, with 3 rising to the top based on time savings and strategic impact. These recommendations span the full basketball operations value chain: coaches get more time back for strategic planning work and direct player engagement, scouts can expand their coverage while maintaining decision quality, and medical staff can make more confident assessments during critical moments.

With these recommendations, the franchise can: reclaim 200+ monthly hours currently lost to manual coordination, allowing staff to focus on strategic analysis and player development instead of administrative busywork. Decision velocity can accelerate during compressed timelines—draft preparation, trade deadlines, free agency—through automated data synthesis that replaces hours of manual document review.

The organization can also scale evaluation capacity without hiring proportionally more staff, using intelligent scheduling and report automation to handle growing workloads efficiently.

Because proof-of-concept timelines run just 3-4 weeks per solution, competitive advantages can materialize within a single season: sharper prospect evaluation, faster injury risk assessment, smarter scout deployment, and higher-quality developmental insights that translate directly to on-court performance.

Basketball operations now has a validated implementation plan—not theoretical possibilities, but concrete solutions with realistic timelines that leadership can act on immediately.

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Why This Matters

This franchise understood they had a problem: talented staff spending too much time coordinating schedules and compiling reports instead of developing competitive edges. But like many professional sports organizations, they struggled to pinpoint which AI investments would actually move the needle versus which would just add complexity. The risk was either staying stuck in manual workflows (while competitors modernized) or chasing shiny technology that didn't fit their actual needs.

Morningside delivered clarity in just one week. By systematically assessing workflows across all 12 departments—not just asking what people wanted, but observing where time was actually bleeding—we pinpointed exactly which automation opportunities would create the biggest competitive advantages. The franchise went from "we know we need to modernize" to holding a roadmap with 3 validated solutions, 200+ hours of monthly savings projected, and proof-of-concept timelines short enough to deploy mid-season.

The bigger picture: In professional sports, competitive advantages compound. Organizations that free up hundreds of hours for strategic work while competitors stay mired in manual coordination don't just work more efficiently—they develop better players, identify better prospects, and make smarter roster decisions. That's the transformation we mapped: from administrative burden to competitive moat.