Having just bought a set of four tickets in the bleachers for the 6/11 Sox game against the Orioles, I saw this NetworkWorld story (thanks to Uncle Fester) pointing out the role Lenovo’s ThinkPads play behind the scenes in the NBA. Having been a fierce Celtics fan in the halycon days of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, I would dearly love to see the Celts vanquish the Lakers on the home court parquet. So where’s my tickets?
Lenovo is a primary sponsor of the NBA. Indeed, the NBA statisticians cooked up a stat — the Lenovo Stat – that predicts the best combination of a team’s players against another team’s best set. Here’s what the NetworkWorld reporter saw:
“The adventure actually started on Wednesday, when I was in Boston at a tech conference listening to a market watcher spew out numbers on virtualization and data centers and later squirming through a talk by an open source enthusiast whose presentation software or hardware was on fritz. I was momentarily distracted from the latter presentation when I saw an email invitation pop into my inbox from Lenovo to check out the big role its technology is playing at this year’s NBA Finals. A colleague says I must have pulled a muscle I replied to the email so fast.
While I have to confess I’ve never met with Lenovo during my two decades at Network World, checking out the company’s goods at Game 1 between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers seemed like as good a time as any. Though as it turns out, I actually didn’t meet with anyone from Lenovo (so no, their execs weren’t buttering me up in a luxury box to encourage me to write something).
It was the NBA’s and Celtics’ top techies who showed a few other tech editors and myself around “the digital center of the NBA,†including a handful of laptops used to handle everything from game stats to clock starts/stops and video replays, plus a pretty typical wiring closet deep in the bowels of the TD Banknorth Garden. Meanwhile, sports reporters from ESPN buzzed around the players and coaches, and wacky DJs tried to out-scream each other.”