High above Oracle Arena, six networked cameras are ushering in a new wave of advanced basketball analytics.

OAKLAND, California — Outside Oracle Arena, it’s a balmy 65-degree spring day. But up in the building’s rafters, 80-odd feet above the hardwood floor, the air is crisp and the view vertigo-inducing.

They tell me the future of professional basketball is up here somewhere, but all I’m trying to do is step carefully along the 30-inch-wide catwalks without dropping my notebook on the performers below. They’re busy rehearsing for their performance during the Golden State Warriors‘ final home game of the season, still some seven hours away.

Forget box scores that just show rebounds, assists and shooting percentage. How about dribbles per possession? Or the miles each player runs in a half?

“Well, you’re going to have look down if you want to see the camera.”

Travis Schlenk, the team’s director of player personnel and resident stats geek, has already been up here three times this season, so you’d think this would be no big deal for him, but his sweaty palms are grasping the railing the same as mine. He’s right, though. About six feet down, affixed to one of the giant concrete beams supporting the Oracle Arena ceiling, is a nondescript yet professional-looking videocam staring down at the eastern half of the court.

There are five more of these cameras strategically placed within Oracle Arena, and while a sellout crowd of 19,596 watched the hometown team destroy the playoff-bound Portland Trail Blazers by 24 points that evening, these eyes in the sky were streaming high-quality video to servers in the Midwest.

The system is called SportVU, named for the Israeli startup that developed the tech. Stats, the Chicago-based data-crunching outfit in charge of this whole operation, is hoping a six-team pilot program conducted this season will usher in a new era of advanced basketball analytics.

Forget box scores that just show rebounds, assists and shooting percentage. How about calculating dribbles per possession, or the miles each player runs in a half? These previously unquantifiable statistics, along with myriad others, are now a reality in today’s NBA.

And while 80 percent of league teams still haven’t wised up to the coming wave of data analysis, SportVU can boast three of this season’s six division winners as clients, as well as upstart squads like the Warriors. With more teams seemingly ready to jump aboard next season, the basketball-analytics tide has decidedly turned. and the game may never be the same.

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