NBA and Amazon bring AI stats to live games with 'Inside the Game'
Fans could soon see the true difficulty of every shot and the hidden impact of every defender, starting with the 2025–26 season.
If you've ever looked at a box score and felt like something was missing, you are not alone. Points, rebounds, and assists only scratch the surface of what happens on the court. A contested jumper and a wide-open layup both look very different in the game, yet on paper, they are treated exactly the same.
That is the gap the NBA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) want to close. Starting with the 2025–26 season, the league will roll out Inside the Game, an AI platform that tracks 29 points on every player’s body in real time. Every cut, pivot, and arm extension feeds into models designed to measure parts of basketball that fans have always seen but never had a number for.
One of the headline insights is Expected Field Goal Percentage, which calculates the odds of a shot going in based on body position and defensive coverage. Another, called Gravity, shows how much defensive attention a player attracts and how that movement opens space for teammates. Also, you can expect the new Defensive Score Box to go deeper than rebounds or blocks, showing how defenders alter possessions even without obvious highlights.
Emmanuel Umahi
For fans and analysts who want more, AWS says it'll introduce Play Finder, a tool that lets you search NBA footage at the level of individual plays. You could pull up every time Curry shot a contested three, or watch how Giannis collapsed defenses by drawing extra coverage. For coaches, broadcasters, and even YouTube creators, that kind of access could quickly become a powerful tool.
These insights will not stay hidden in analytics blogs. They will appear live during broadcasts, in the NBA app, and on NBA.com. The goal is simple here seems to border on giving fans the kind of depth once reserved for stat junkies and betting dashboards, right in the moment of the game.
If this feels familiar, it’s because other sports have already taken this path. The NFL and MLB, for example, use Sony’s Hawk-Eye cameras for player tracking, and Wimbledon went as far as letting Hawk-Eye replace human line calls. For the NBA, Inside the Game is its most ambitious step yet into real-time, AI-powered analysis.
It also deepens the league’s ties with Amazon. In 2024, the NBA signed an eleven-year media rights deal with Prime Video to stream 66 games a year, while AWS became its official cloud and AI partner. Inside the Game is the first major product of that partnership.
So when the new season tips off and Curry pulls up from 30 feet, you'll not just be watching whether a shot falls. You'll now know whether the shot was truly a forty-percent moonshot or a ten-percent miracle.
Louis Eriakha
