EA Sports has sent along an interview that was conducted with Synergy Sports creator Garrick Barr. For those unaware, Synergy Sports is the company powering Dynamic DNA/Live 365 in NBA Live 09.

EA Sports: Tell us a little bit about yourself (background).

Garrick Barr: I grew up in Manhattan Beach, California and I played high school and college basketball before embarking on a short career in the airline industry. In my early thirties, I started coaching at the college level in Phoenix Arizona. In 1992, I was hired to the Phoenix Suns by Paul Westphal, my high school teammate, but then my career took an unexpected turn when I found I was unusually adept at finding ways to harness technology for coaching and scouting. During that initial year, I purchased the first non-linear editing system used in coaching and also designed the first scouting database for front office use to prepare for the NBA draft. After working with Avid and several other vendors to help improve their products so that coaches would use them, I founded Quantified Scouting Service where, for the first time ever, every possession of every NBA game was logged in extreme detail to produce highly detailed “Offensive Tendencies Reports” used by most NBA teams.

EA: [Garrick] I understand you founded Synergy Sports, what drove you to do this?

GB: I always knew that it would be incredibly valuable to coaches and scouts if I could link our player reports to NBA game footage and allow staff to retrieve instantaneous edits to match their needs. Unfortunately, the technology in 1998 would not support this. So I bided my time, but in 2004 I arranged a meeting with one of the top media technology consultants in the world, Nils Lahr, to see if the time was right to pursue this vision. Nils liked the project and explained that the timing was perfect. In fact, he told me that just one year earlier, development would have been ten times more expensive. I convinced Nils to join the enterprise and little did I know that from this time on, Synergy would ride the “bleeding edge.” I just thank my lucky stars that I was able to convince Nils to partner with me so that we could overcome the countless technical obstacles necessary to bring Synergy to life.

EA: In your own words, what does Synergy Sports do for the NBA teams that subscribe to your service?

GB: Synergy lets NBA coaches and scouts “follow their nose” with the most focused work-flow process imaginable. Synergy logs all NBA games (and tons of college and international games) and generates an enormous amount of offensive and defensive data to produce a growing number of pro-level analytics. These statistical displays allow staff to focus on any aspect of a game, team or player and when they identify something of interest, they drill down on matching video which is delivered in just seconds over the Internet. This has never before been possible and it allows coaches to immediately see what happened out on the court in very specific situation so that they can quickly come to conclusions as they evaluate players for the draft, formulate game plans or work on their own player’s skills development. Of course, Synergy is more than simply “Google” for basketball. We have end-to-end solutions that are constantly evolving to address the many functions performed in NBA basketball operations. Perhaps most important to mention is how we enable collaboration from staff all over the world via our online services.

EA: For those unconvinced, why is Synergy Sports the most authentic statistics and tendencies driver for the AI in NBA LIVE 09?

GB: The answer is simple: we log every event of every NBA game to produce incredibly accurate data on what players actually do both on offense and on defense. This data is comprehensive and has become indispensable to almost every NBA team as they use our services for everything from evaluating players to winning games.

EA: What's the difference between say a couple of NBA LIVE producers coming up with ratings, statistics for NBA LIVE 09 versus Synergy Sports?

GB: Your producers are at a hopeless disadvantage. In the end, they have always had to guess how players will act out on the court –- just like we used to do as coaches before Synergy came along. We might have known many of the tendencies of key players, but in-depth knowledge of all players was simply out of our reach. There is too much information to keep track of to accurately predict a player’s performance out on the floor or to reproduce player performance in a video game. This is where the human brain fails and computers excel -- when provided a full data set.

EA: How important is this information to the NBA and NBA teams? Why?

GB: Synergy is the only place to get this type of information and we are the only ones who provide immediate access to matching video for any type of inquiry. Decisions based on information have a far greater chance of being correct than decisions based on partial data or hunches. This is the lesson of “Money Ball.” Analytics are embraced in the corporate world and now they are becoming indispensable to sports. Putting focused video in front of professionals is the finishing touch. Once they have collated video, the pros can bring their special knowledge to the equation as they find ways to gain an edge when engaged in a highly focused work-flow methodology.

EA: What is the most popular thing pulled by NBA teams from Synergy Sports?

GB: I would say it is a toss-up between the single game views and the individual player’s season-to-date performance tendencies views. The first gives them a nearly infinite number of ways to slice and dice any game and the second let’s them fully understand almost every aspect of a player in terms of what they like to do –- or avoid. In basketball, you try to hide your weaknesses and go to your strengths. You also try to attack the opponent’s weaknesses while containing their strengths. It helps to know which is which!