NBA D-League Will Monitor Player Heart Rate, Speed and More

Per Grantland, The NBA has used the D-League for all sorts of experiments — a reduction in the number of timeouts, a ban on consecutive timeouts late in games, more permissive international shot-interference rules, and lots of other things. On Friday it will announce another such D-League trial balloon: Players on four D-League teams will begin wearing small devices in games that measure both physical movements and cardiovascular changes, according to league sources.
Nearly two-dozen NBA teams use the devices, manufactured by three companies, during practices. But no major U.S. professional league has allowed for their regular use during games, the league says. The devices will measure all the time and distance things the SportVU data-tracking cameras are already getting at — player speed, distance traveled, cuts, accelerations and decelerations, and more. It will also track player jumps, something SportVU cameras don’t yet do, the league says.