Implemented cloud-based data and IT infrastructure to evolve from sports team to media and entertainment company
Uses 30+ fan-facing data sources with 100M+ data points and custom-built mobile app to personalize the fan experience
Ingests and analyzes player and game data to improve team performance and player management strategies
Reduces time spent on monotonous, repetitive administrative tasks by 50% with Gemini for Google Workspace
The Golden State Warriors have spent over a decade evolving from a basketball team into a sports and entertainment company. This transformation, in partnership with Google Cloud, has included tech infrastructure improvements, arena ownership, personalized fan experiences, and building a top NBA team.
As one of the league’s founding teams, the Golden State Warriors have adapted and changed alongside basketball itself for more than 80 years. The team’s storied history includes seven NBA Championships, 12 NBA Finals appearances, an NBA-record 73-win season, eight members of the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team, and 33 members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. This best-in-class, innovative mindset doesn’t stop with the team on the court.
When Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the team in 2010, they knew the Warriors needed a place to call home—the arena now known as Chase Center in San Francisco—and started a journey to transform the franchise from a basketball team into a sports and entertainment company. “In that transition, we realized that we're really good at running a basketball team,” says Daniel Brusilovsky, VP of Technology with the Warriors. “We saw an opportunity to collaborate with technology and infrastructure experts who wanted to go on the journey with us and grow together.”
The organization’s vision for Chase Center, for its fans’ experience, and for the future of the franchise all required a need for state-of-the-art technology infrastructure. “Especially being from the Bay Area, we had not just the opportunity, but the expectation from our fans, partners, and ownership group to leverage technology as an enabler of our business,” Brusilovsky adds.
The Warriors set its sights on designing a cloud infrastructure with Google Cloud that was built for its specific needs and could scale with the team. This meant reshaping its IT and data operations as well as redefining how it delivers digital experiences for Warriors fans in the Bay Area.
The Warriors know the heart of a thriving franchise is its fan base. “We want to invest in our brand so fans maintain the kind of love you see with other global sports brands,” Brusilovsky says. “That means creating personalized, contextual experiences for every single one of our fans.”
To make this happen, the Warriors focused its attention on providing a seamless live experience at Chase Center with a leading digital experience using the Warriors + Chase Center mobile app that helps fans connect to the brand. The team built the app from scratch using App Engine and Firebase, so it could rely on built-in authentication features and a wide range of microservices and integrations that allow it to further customize the fan experience over time. “Without Google Cloud, we wouldn’t be able to deliver the digital experience we promise our fans. It gives us a simple solution to complex problems,” Brusilovsky says.
Local fans can use the app for everything from managing game tickets, ordering food, and navigating Chase Center’s amenities to real-time public transit information, so the experience from their home to the court is all in one place.
Both attendees and fans at home can also review scores, stats, replays, and content produced by the Warriors Studio team such as player and coach spotlight videos and behind-the-scenes snapshots.
With so much of the fan experience consolidated in a single place, the Warriors can use more than 30 sources of customer data and more than 100 million data points to refine and personalize every app users’ journey. “If you're coming to the game, and we know that you really like a specific food item at a specific eatery, and you have a favorite player, we can create a digital experience tailored just for you and no one else,” Brusilovsky says. “We know we’re competing against a lot of incredible entertainment options, so it’s invaluable to us to give our fans a second-to-none experience with our brand.”
Behind the scenes, the Warriors have adopted BigQuery to ingest and process its vast stores of data related to its business, customers, and team. Using BigQuery for both business data and basketball data places the team in a unique position to build on a shared technology foundation across the organization. “We know that data isn’t the answer; it helps us find the answer,” says Brusilovsky. “With all of this data together, we’re very mindful that data analysis and decision-making is a combination of an art and a science.”
From a business perspective, the organization is using this information to inform everything from ticket and suite pricing to what types of content to produce. On the team side, the Warriors are using game and player data to build a competitive team on the court. “Our analytics team is out to find answers that convert into winning games,” Brusilovsky shares. “They’re not only able to review league data, they’re also looking at college and international data to offer data-driven guidance to our coaches and scouts. Bringing these teams together, we can make more educated decisions about players.”
The Warriors organization continues to work closely with Google to support internal collaboration. One major step in that journey included implementing Google Workspace to enable its team to do more with less. Most recently, it rolled out a beta test for Gemini for Google Workspace to help employees automate repetitive, manual tasks. “I’m constantly looking for ways to free up my teammates’ time,” Brusilovsky shares. “If there’s a manual process that takes an hour before every game, and we can automate that, that saves us 41 hours a year.” The team can then allocate that time to improving other areas of the business such as its security posture or building new features for fans.
In an ongoing effort to grow and adopt new technologies that align with its mission, the team is also experimenting with Vertex AI to augment both internal and fan-facing services in the near future. It has connected an AI-based, natural language search feature to BigQuery to easily surface answers to frequently asked questions about internal documentation. Going forward, the team plans to bring this real-time service to provide an even better fan experience in its app and on chasecenter.com, so fans can ask questions about bag policies, attendance questions, and more. “Our relationship with Google Cloud continues to play a major role in how we iterate as an organization,” Brusilovsky says. “And Gemini is going to be a big enabler of how we bring the next version of our fan experience to life.”
The Golden State Warriors are an American professional basketball team based in San Francisco. The Warriors compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference.
Industry: Media and Entertainment
Location: United States
Products: BigQuery, App Engine, Compute Engine, Firebase, Gemini for Google Workspace, Google Cloud Storage, Google Workspace, Vertex AI