Throughout the 2025-2026 NBA season, the Sixers will honor the 25th anniversary of their legendary 2001 team. The celebration kicks off with the return of Hip-Hop, the muscle-bound rabbit mascot who debuted in 1998 and represented the team for 13 years. Throughout the year the team will wear jerseys and feature court designs from the 2001 season, and it will honor the team and its star player, Allen 'The Answer' Iverson, during a reunion game on Jan. 31, 2026. As a pop culture scholar and director of a program in critical sports studies, I regularly teach about the influence of Iverson, whom I was a big fan of during my elementary school, high school and college years in Philadelphia. I even named my pet guinea pig after the Hall of Fame player. The City of Brotherly Love is known for its passionate sports fans. Although this passion has been interpreted by some as aggressive, if not barbaric, Philadelphians' knowledge of and loyalty to their teams has never waned ' even as they endured a 25-year championship drought across their four major professional teams....

My instructor drew up a basic diagram for me to follow in my next drill using an iPad. He showed how he wanted me to start at the baseline, then curl up to the corner of the free-throw line before taking a pass and driving to the basket. Easy enough to remember. Here's the thing, though: I didn't have to remember any of the words he spoke or any of the lines he scribbled. That's because, as he drew on his iPad screen, his diagrams simply appeared under my feet. Anytime he wanted to change or remove the drill, he simply tapped the iPad's screen, and everything on the floor changed instantly, illuminating my new route. Over the course of an afternoon visit, ASB's team took me through a catalog of visual experiences on their basketball court setup. Name an NBA team court design; they could swap it onto the surface we were standing on with one tap. Any practice drill template could be loaded onto the floor using ASB's 'Whiteboard' feature, a potential capability leap for basketball coaches and trainers. The company tells me that soon, these diagrams could feature active animations that change as the drill is completed. Meanwhile, a sensor in my pocket tracked my movements and created fun effects on the LED panels beneath me, like a trail of flames that flittered behind me as I ran. (This in-person demo was made possible by ASB covering some travel costs.)...

If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another' Is it a team's record through the regular season' Or the chemistry among its players' Maybe it's the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer. All of these factors play some role in a team's chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there's one member who consistently boosts their team's performance: the data analyst. The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study's authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team's record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games....

Artificial-intelligence company Google DeepMind has put a version of its most advanced large language model (LLM), Gemini, into robots. Using the model, machines can perform some tasks ' such as 'slam dunking' a miniature basketball through a desktop hoop ' despite never having watched another robot do the action, says the firm. The company is among several working to harness the artificial intelligence (AI) advances that power chatbots to create general-purpose robots. The approach also comes with safety concerns, given such models' propensity to generate wrong and harmful outputs. The hope is to create machines that are intuitive to operate and can tackle a range of physical tasks, without relying on human supervision or being preprogrammed. By connecting to Gemini's robotic models, a developer could enhance their robot so that it comprehends 'natural language and now understands the physical world in a lot more detail than before,' says Carolina Parada, who leads the Google DeepMind robotics team and is based in Boulder, Colorado....