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The Science of the
Perfect Shot
How Noah Basketball's data-driven shooting system conquered the NBA — and quietly changed what it means to train a shooter.
Halfway through the 2018–19 season, Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse had a problem. His All-Star point guard Kyle Lowry was mired in a shooting slump — and nobody could diagnose why. Lowry's form looked fine on film. His practice sessions seemed sharp. But the shots weren't falling. So Nurse did something most coaches couldn't have done a decade earlier: he pulled up a cloud-based analytics dashboard and scrolled through months of Lowry's shot data, frame by frame.
What he found was subtle — a slight drift in arc consistency, invisible to the naked eye but unmistakable in the numbers. The Raptors had been using the Noah Shooting System since the early days, and that investment was about to pay dividends. Lowry corrected his mechanics, the Raptors kept winning, and at season's end, they lifted the Larry O'Brien Trophy. It was a quiet validation of a technology that had been quietly revolutionizing how professional basketball players learn to shoot.
A Solution Born from a Father's Problem
The Noah story starts, improbably, with a venture capitalist and his daughter's jump shot. In the early 2000s, Alan Marty — a Silicon Valley investor — was searching for a way to help improve her shooting mechanics. His first attempt involved a rake and a ladder. His subsequent attempts became considerably more sophisticated, eventually incorporating motion-tracking cameras and the kind of mathematical rigor more commonly found in aerospace engineering than a recreational gym.
Marty realized quickly that he had stumbled onto something far bigger than a personal project. The technology he was developing could answer a question that coaches and players had been wrestling with forever: not just whether a shot goes in, but why — and, more importantly, how to fix it when it doesn't.
"After all that, we know the answers of what leads to good shooting and what leads to poor shooting. So, we can quickly diagnose what the problem is, and then they can go back and work on those. If you have the answers to the test, you're a pretty smart person."
— John Carter, CEO, Noah Basketball
The company that emerged, Noah Basketball, spent years refining the system before bringing it to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Officials there were so impressed that Noah won first place in both the research category and the startup competition simultaneously — a remarkable achievement that transformed a promising startup into a must-have league tool almost overnight.
How it works
The Technology Under the Rim
At its core, the Noah Shooting System is elegantly simple: a sensor — about the size of a shoebox — mounted thirteen feet above the rim, looking straight down at the basket. What it does with its vantage point is anything but simple.
The system captures the position of the basketball thirty times per second as it enters the basket area, building a precise three-dimensional picture of every shot's flight path. Using a combination of Intel RealSense cameras and Microsoft Azure Kinect depth-sensing technology, Noah tracks three fundamental variables that, together, define the quality of any shot taken anywhere on the floor.
The three metrics Noah measures on every single shot
The critical insight behind those numbers isn't just geometric — it's physiological. A shot with a 45-degree arc entering 11 inches deep presents the largest possible target to a shooter. The laws of physics guarantee it. Noah's database of over 600 million tracked shots has validated what the geometry predicted: shooters who consistently hit those targets make significantly more shots.
After each attempt, Noah's voice system immediately announces the results — arc, depth, left-right — aloud. That instant auditory feedback is central to the whole philosophy. Coaches don't need to be standing next to a player to cue a correction. The system does it in real time, every rep, every session, creating the kind of relentless, precise repetition that builds genuine muscle memory rather than just volume.
From court to cloud
Noahlytics: Where Data Becomes Development
The sensor above the hoop is only half the system. Every shot feeds into Noahlytics, Noah's cloud-based analytics platform — a dashboard that gives coaches, trainers, and players a complete picture of shooting performance filtered any way they want: by shot length, shot type, player, court position, makes versus misses, or date range.
The platform is what turned Noah from a practice gadget into a genuine development tool. Coaches can pull a player's historical data from identical shot locations and compare it against their current numbers. They can identify patterns — a shooter who drifts left on mid-range pull-ups but is perfectly centered on catch-and-shoot threes — that would be invisible in any film session. They can track whether a mechanical correction is actually sticking across hundreds of reps, or whether a player regresses under fatigue.
"Between the feedback and the detailed reports, it removes the guesswork of what a player needs to do to improve."
The system also uses facial recognition technology to automatically attribute shots to individual players — eliminating the need for wearables or manual data entry. Players can walk onto a practice court, start shooting, and the system knows who they are and begins logging immediately.
NBA adoption
From Skepticism to Standard Equipment
The NBA is an ecosystem where coaches guard their methods jealously and players can be sensitive about anything that seems to critique their shot. When Noah first approached NBA teams, the barriers were real. Shooting is deeply personal, deeply habitual, and deeply tied to a player's confidence. Introducing data into that space required tact as much as technology.
The tipping point was the MIT Sloan win — and the results that followed. Teams that adopted Noah early started reporting measurable improvements, and word traveled. Today, 28 of the 30 NBA teams have the system installed in their practice facilities. It is, in the language of product adoption, effectively the default choice for NBA player development.
The Golden State Warriors — one of the most analytically sophisticated organizations in professional sports — became early and enthusiastic champions of the system. The Warriors integrated Noah heavily into their player development program, with then-assistant coach Jama Mahlalela describing the audio feedback as the key to building the muscle memory needed to repeat the ideal shot form under game pressure.
"The Noah Shooting System and the data generated is used heavily by the Golden State Warriors and is a big part of our players development program. We have seen first-hand how it can improve shooting percentages."
— Mike Dunleavy, Vice President of Basketball Operations, Golden State Warriors
Nick Nurse — who guided the Raptors' Lowry through that mid-season correction — went on to join Noah Basketball's board of directors, a signal of how deeply the technology has embedded itself into the professional coaching community.
Beyond the pros
A System That Scales
What makes Noah's story genuinely significant isn't just its penetration of the NBA — it's the fact that the same technology is accessible at every level of the game. The company currently works with over 200 NCAA programs, more than 1,000 high school programs, and consumer-facing facilities like Shoot 360 locations where amateur players can access the same analytics that NBA shooters use in practice.
That reach matters for the game's future. The next generation of shooters is growing up with real-time data feedback as a baseline expectation. The guesswork that defined shooting instruction for a century — a coach's eye, a feel-based cue, a vague instruction to "get more arc" — is being replaced by precise, measurable targets. A high school player who has trained with Noah since age fifteen arrives in college or the pros already fluent in the vocabulary of arc, depth, and alignment.
"We now have a whole generation of players who grew up with technology in their pockets. So, they expect data and apps and computers in almost everything they do."
— John Carter, CEO, Noah Basketball
The company has also found a role in broadcast media — working with Microsoft, CBS, and the BIG3 league to provide real-time graphic elements and animations that translate shooting data for fans watching at home. In 2018, the NBA experimented with live basket charts during the three-point shooting contest. What was once purely a coaching tool is beginning to reshape how fans understand and watch the game itself.
The Numbers That Define a Perfect Shot
In the end, Noah Basketball's great contribution is deceptively simple: it gave coaches and players an honest answer to a question the sport had been asking for decades. Not "did the shot go in?" but "how did the shot travel, what does that pattern reveal, and what needs to change?"
The company's database now holds data from over 600 million shots. It has watched LeBron James work on his arc. It has tracked thousands of free-throw sessions from players at every level. It has diagnosed slumps and confirmed breakthroughs, session by session, rep by rep.
The answer it keeps arriving at is the same: 45 degrees. Eleven inches deep. Straight on the cylinder. These aren't suggestions. They're the physics of the game made visible — and for 28 NBA teams, hundreds of college programs, and a growing number of players at every level, they are the foundation on which better shooting is built.