Advertisement - scroll for more content
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement - scroll for more content
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Jason Beede: I asked #Magic coach Sean Sweeney pregame in Toronto about Joe Mazzulla using AI: Beede Question: “Joe Mazzulla was talking this morning about using AI for organization and data purposes. What do you think of that — like the integration of AI — and would you use that at all?” Sweeney Answer: “I think Joe’s probably smarter than I am. I’m at sea level and he’s at 30,000 feet. No, I think, any data that you can find, any tools that you can use to measure and help you make better decisions, we definitely use. And so I think, just in general, organizationally, my experience so far with the Magic is that we’re at the forefront of anything that we do when it comes to analysis, looking at how teams are playing, how we’re playing, what we can do better. So, (we) try to use whatever we can.”
Bobby Krivitsky: Bulls head coach Thiago Splitter when asked if he uses AI — his comments come on the heels of Joe Mazzulla saying he uses it to help him with certain things: “I think everybody in this room uses it, right?”
As the use of artificial intelligence tools has proliferated, Joe Mazzulla has found ways to incorporate them into his workflow and challenge his thinking. “Every offseason, really this offseason, it’s like, okay, let’s test all of our processes,” Mazzulla explained at Celtics shootaround on Friday morning. “Is our pregame film process the right way? Is our halftime film process the right way? Is our film room set up for learning the right way? How should our film room look?”
Mazzulla explained that he’s not using AI to get definitive answers. “It’s more just helping organize, helping become more efficient, helping understanding,” he said. “You really use it for just conversation and riffs on, like — okay, here’s what I’m wrestling with. What does this look like from a psychological perspective? What is the research and the data? You quickly get just so much research and data on things.”
One of Mazzulla’s main purposes for AI is to brainstorm more effective ways to communicate, whether that’s during the team’s practice, 15-minute halftime, or other limited chunks of time. “It really helps you test your processes that you think are efficient,” he said. “Like our halftime process, is that really the most efficient way to watch film and ready for the second half? Is our pregame process the most efficient way to make sure our guys have retention of the game plan, and what we’re needing to do, and they’re in the right space mentally and psychologically?”
Advertisement
Joe Mazzulla on using AI: “I use Claude every day for coaching thoughts and being able to process stuff psychologically and being able to break things down into, ok, how do you handle situations like this? So I like where Jake’s (the caller’s) headed, using Claude for things.” “I haven’t (used Chat GPT), but I’m all in on Claude. One of the great things about Claude is it ends everything in a question. So it keeps you in a constant state of searching, getting more out of you. Better prompts. It just prompts you, it challenges your brain. It was beneficial in the offseason, my personal development and also where I wanted to take this psychologically for our team. It’s good because in coaching, you say phrases and you riff on the phrase. Like, ‘we’re looking for moments of greatness,’ so then you could throw that in there and say ok, how can we find moments of greatness within what we’re trying to do. So it’s been good.”
Joe Mazzulla on using AI: “I think it’s more to learn from your former self. So I’ll throw in last year’s practice plan and be like, was that efficient? Because you don’t know in the present moment if it was an efficient practice plan or if it was an efficient use of your time? So you learn from your former self, and so you throw in a practice plan from last year. OK what is the efficiency of this plan? What was the percentage of the things that we got done? Did I match what my points of emphasis for that day to the practice plan? Like you could say we have to get better at offensive rebounding, but if it’s only 5% of your practice plan, then you’re not really emphasizing what you have to get better at. So you’re just really looking at it from an efficiency standpoint and learning from your former self. You throw in, here’s our halftime process. How can our halftime process become more efficient? Because we watch film sometimes, but it’s a reactive film session because we’re watching film of plays that already happened, not plays that may happen. So are you distracting the brain because you’re telling them things that have already happened, when they might not even be in that position in the second half? ... So it’s not so much about, how can it help me going forward? It’s how can it help me learn from my past and make me better?”
The Garden also acknowledged an error involving a mass email sent to MSG corporate staffers several weeks before the ceremony. The email asked the staffers to click on a link to be fitted for a championship ring, sources confirmed. However, the link led to a mandatory cybersecurity class – a tactic the Garden deployed as response to a hacking incident. An MSG spokesman called the use of rings an error. “The company had previously sent out an email to its corporate team as a simulation of a phishing attack designed to strengthen our security against hackers,” an MSG spokesman told The Post. “MSG was recently hacked and extorted using an employee login and password obtained through a similar phishing attack. Using the rings as a lure to gain employees attention was an unfortunate mistake.”
The Knicks are handing out 275 championship rings to employees worth almost $4 million, The Post has learned. The news comes on the heels of a report from The Athletic revealing that the Knicks handed empty boxes to the top assistant coaches – Chris Jent, Rick Brunson and Brendan O’Connor – during Tuesday’s ceremony. Jent, Brunson and O’Connor will get their real rings “shortly,” said a league source, who added that the distribution of 275 championship rings was always the plan. All the Knicks assistant coaches will eventually receive championship rings, league sources said.
Advertisement
In eras gone by, the schedule was drawn up by hand, courtesy of Matt Winick, the league’s longtime senior vice president of scheduling and game operations, who for 30 years was known as the “Scheduling Czar” or “Human Computer.” But Winick retired in late 2015 and was eventually replaced by machine learning software, or, more specifically, the company Fastbreak AI. Fastbreak AI had evolved itself. In its early iterations, co-founder and Chief Product Officer Chris Groer says it took “many hours and human intervention” to churn out the maze that is an 82-game NBA schedule. But that changed, he says, when they “invested significant R&D into developing a proprietary new algorithm that can build a 1,200-game schedule while accounting for literally thousands of rules in less than half an hour.”
NBA Communications: Starting tonight, NBA officials in select preseason games will use wrist wearables to communicate with the Replay Center in designated situations, including potential replay reviews, scoring changes and clock malfunctions. The test follows a successful pilot at NBA Summer League 2026 and will not extend into the 2026-27 regular season.
NBA Communications: During select preseason games, “connected basketballs” developed with @WilsonBasktball will be utilized to collect data that helps in building more accurate, reliable models for future use in real-time officiating determinations. The data collected is for research only and will not impact officiating decisions during these preseason games.