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Basketball is by far my favorite sport. I played on teams all throughout my childhood, from grade school to high school. When I was growing up, all you had was a ball in a hoop, and if you wanted to get better, you just had to shoot nonstop. And if you were lucky enough to play organized basketball, listening to your coaches, there was no tech around that could really help you improve your jump shot. But now the tech landscape has changed dramatically. NBA teams will have tens of thousands of dollars worth of high tech equipment in their practice facilities. That will track literally everything. But if you're just an average person like me and want to try improving your jump shot,
there's actually quite a bit out there you have access to. The first piece of basketball tech I wanted to try was the Spalding TF 1000 Smart Basketball. This looks and feels identical to a high quality indoor basketball. But inside our a bunch of sensors that connect to an app via Bluetooth that is able to track your shot metrics, makes misses, shot distance, shot arc, and spin rate, and provide advice on how to improve your shot. The last time I played basketball was about two years ago, so I'm curious to see how I do.
I took this thing to the gym several times, and I got up 1664 shots. Exactly. And despite having sensors inside the ball fields. Completely natural to shoot with, the weight feels identical to a regular ball. The exterior feels the same, and dribbling feels almost the I'd say one out of every 200 or so bounces feels a little bit off, but it's hardly noticeable. And you're using this to practice shooting, not dribbling. If you tried this ball before, let me know in the comments if you've experienced the same thing.
I shot 56% across all my sessions with the ball, and one of the best and worst things about it is the live audio feedback. If you make a shot, you get a cool cash register sound, and if you miss it, you get a gross clank sound. Simply perfect. Perfect spin. Two. Slow. Pick it measures your shot ball, arc rotation speed and shot release time. And if it doesn't fall into the acceptable range, it will tell you. For the life of me, I had a very hard time getting this ball to spin fast enough for this ball's liking and hearing get more spin every few seconds did get irritating, but that's also kind of the point.
I found that on my last session, I was getting that feedback way less, and looking at the data, I shot better from distance and my switch percentage went up, so it's almost annoying me into improvement. You can turn off the audio feedback, but I don't recommend it because it reminds you the ball is actually connected to your phone. The charts show you which shots are landing in the desired range for all of these metrics. And if I was able to do all three at once.
Odds are the ball went in. Although I do have a lot of work to do when it comes to release time, which was the only measurement that had an inverse relationship with makes and misses. I guarantee that all this data would have helped me a lot when I played, and there's a bunch of community engagement things on the app like challenges, badges, and leaderboards to help keep you practicing. Sort of like Duolingo, which gamified the game. And inside the app, you get access to training and coaching videos, and the app will recommend specific videos after a session based on your data like ways to get more spin.
The videos usefulness, though, were a little hit or miss. The ball connectivity did glitch on me once, and shot tracking isn't always perfect. I noticed very rarely that the ball took a weird bounce on the rim and went through the net very softly. It would sometimes register it as a miss, but again, very rare. Overall, my experience with this ball has been really great, but there is one place where I might lose some people. There are two smart basketballs that they sell.
One is a hybrid indoor outdoor ball and the other is the one I'm holding. This one is 200 bucks and the other ball is 250 bucks. That sounds like a lot. But the reason the ball is so expensive is that it comes with a one year subscription to the app. Everything inside the app is locked behind an annual subscription of $125. Putting myself in the shoes of myself. 20 years ago when I was in high school, I probably would have put my summer money towards something like this because all I really cared about was basketball. And there's one thing you're probably wondering, do you somehow need to charge this thing before every workout?
Remarkably, no. You never have to charge it. But that also means someday down the line, it will die. The company says you can get 500 hours of use out of this before the battery actually becomes a problem, and the ball itself might actually start to wear out before the battery. My shooting workouts usually lasts between 45 and 60 minutes, so that means I would get several years of use out of this, and you can just use it as a regular ball and choose not to connect it to preserve the overall, I'm a big fan and one of my favorite things about it is that it doesn't really complicate anything. You just use it like a regular ball shoot like you normally would, and you get data that can help you get better.
So this is what you get from a smart basketball. But what if the hoop itself was smart? I went to San Diego to find So right behind me is the Huupe Arena. This is the first smart basketball sensor that you can put anywhere. The Huupe Arena is an all in one product that has the stand and everything, but you can just get an upgrade kit if you already have a basketball hoop. And turn any hoop into a smart hoop. It tracks all of your shot data where you're shooting from your spin rotation, your shot angle, all kinds of cool stuff.
I'm going to do a session myself to see how good or bad my jumpshot is right now. Oh. I made it in the other tank, I promise. Play Oh so I was just shooting for about five minutes, and now I get to check out all of my data. So I'm going to hit end session on the app here. And it's going to give me all I did. So let's see. According to Huupe IQ shooting tips I am missing short which means that I'm not says I'm not bending my knees enough when I shoot. My misses are short, so I need to get a little more knee action when I'm shooting. Swish ratio 20%. That doesn't seem very good, sadly, but I did go 14 to 20 on twos, six of 11 on threes, 20 out of 31 total. So that's much better than I thought I'd do.
That was super fun. This smart hoop uses a sensor mounted on the top of the backboard that is incredibly secure. I even hit it with the ball on purpose And it doesn't actually use a camera like I expected, which Huupe sales director Michael Cummings told me was important for privacy. There's no camera. And one of the reasons why it was just privacy, we had a lot of parents reach out on one of our original ones that said, this is great, but we don't want our kids to be on camera. essentially you have two different radars, let's just call it that, getting back all this input that it's tracking and what I like to look at it as is a check and balance system where if the leader misses something, the radar will pick it up.
If the radar misses something, the leader picks it up, you can tell every time you shoot a make or miss, there's about a half a second before the lights go on. That's because they're talking back and forth to make sure that it's 99.9% accurate. Once they agree, if it's a make or a miss, then they shake hands and the light goes on, It does require power to use in the app as free, with a subscription option for more features, and the features the company is most excited about are the social ones. it's the reason the founders kind of got into this. They were best friends growing up, and one of them, as I remember the story, moved away. And so they were snap chatting, their shots back and forth, and I was like, that's the craziest thing.
So they wanted to create something that's interconnected. so if you're in Reno and I'm down in San Diego, we can actually challenge each other and we can play against each other. In fact, while we were filming, somebody chimed in that they want to do they wanted to go head to head, and that person could have been in Germany. That person could have been anywhere. One area where the Huupe is quite a bit different from the smart ball is that it's easier to play together and separate whose data is whose, and teams are starting to adopt it. So there's a local university that is using the Huupe arena.
They put it on kind of their skills hoops. They can find out on teams mode, I can put it on own and open it up. And I can see on what part of the court you shot from, how many field goals you made, how many were three point, how many were two point, and I can assess it. so what do I think of the Huupe? I think it is awesome. I've been shooting here for like three hours. I could keep going. There are a lot of really cool things in the app that are going to teach you how to be a better player, like knowing that I'm not bending my knees enough and getting enough lift is why I'm always short.
I think is really useful information, and if I had one at home, I would probably get a lot better at shooting. But I think one of the more underrated things about this is that it's kind of addictive. You want to keep shooting, you want to see your percentages go up. And if I had one, I would be shooting a lot more than I do right now. if you're someone who wants to get better at basketball but hasn't really played competitively, having these built in guided workouts in the premium subscription of Huupe, I think will make you a better player.
I played competitively for most of my youth, so I have a pretty good idea of drills I should be doing to actually help me improve. But if that's something that you're unfamiliar with, that's going to do a whole lot, and it's going to be way cheaper than an actual basketball coach. I had a lot of fun testing out the Spalding TF 100 smart ball and the Huupe Arena smart basketball hoop. Those things are actually pretty addictive and I just want to keep shooting. But both are expensive. Both cost money and both have subscriptions, although the Huupe subscription is optional.
Is there anything free out there that can help my jump shot? Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if the new meta Muse AI, which is free right now, has any good advice about my shooting form. I downloaded the Muse app onto my phone. Uploaded a roughly four minute video clip of me shooting around and asked for advice on my shooting form after processing for quite a while, it gave me some surprisingly solid advice. Just like Huupe, Muse said that I wasn't bending my knees enough, which was causing me to miss short, so that's something I really need to work on.
It also said that I was drifting a little bit, which means that my bass isn't quite where it needs to be, which is another footwork issue. Muse then asked if I wanted a basketball workout based on the video, and I said sure, and it provided me what looks like a pretty solid workout that I'm going to do sometime in the future. Honestly, I was pretty surprised by the quality of the advice that Muse gave me on my shooting form. And if you just Google AI powered basketball shooting coach, you'll find a ton of different options
out there that might be more specific and provide you even better feedback. Over the last decade. In pro basketball, the total effective field goal percentage has been steadily rising, and more and more players are shooting and making three point shots. rise in shooting definitely has something to do with the amount of tracking tech NBA practice facilities are using. With this type of tech becoming more and more accessible. I think these trends in basketball will only accelerate, and players of all ages are going to get better at shooting. I've gotten quite a bit better just in a couple of weeks.
Does this mean anything for the future of the NBA? Probably more and more players are going to be entering the league with the ability to shoot threes, and it's been changing the entire geometry of the game, game has evolved a lot in the last 20 years and it's only going to continue to change. And who knows, maybe if I had this kind of tech when I was younger, my career could have gone beyond high school. No, no, it wouldn't have. next time I play a pickup game, I should be a little more likely to hit open shots. me, seeing my shooting metrics is fun.
It's similar to running. Tracking progress is really satisfying, and it's got me to shoot more baskets in the last month than I have in the past two years, and it's also just a fun way to exercise. But have you tried any of these basketball training technologies or for any other sport? Let us know in the comments! If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. But it's going to do it for me. This is Owen. I'll see you in the next one.
