WNBA Inside the Game, powered by AWS: AI Meets the Next Era of Women’s Basketball

Starting this season, fans will experience the game like never before with Gravity, a new AI-powered stat that quantifiably measures what the eye test never could.

The Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) milestone 30th season arrives at a moment of unprecedented momentum. In 2025, the league garnered over 3.2 billion views across WNBA social platforms, had over 75 million unique viewers across the United States, set a total attendance record with 3.4 million fans, and experienced record international engagement.  The league now enters this season beginning a historic media rights deal, launching new global partnerships, and welcoming two new teams, the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo, expanding the league to 15 franchises. Along with the new broadcast deals, corporate partners, and two new teams, a new kind of intelligence is coming to the W.

Starting this season, WNBA Inside the Game powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is bringing its AI-powered basketball intelligence platform to the WNBA for the first time, giving fans, broadcasters, and teams a deeper, more precise understanding of how the game is played and won.

As the Official Cloud and Cloud AI Partner of the NBA, WNBA, and affiliate leagues, AWS extended the basketball intelligence platform that has transformed how the NBA is understood and experienced to the WNBA. The centerpiece is Gravity, an analytic that finally quantifies one of basketball’s most elusive qualities.

What is Gravity?

Every basketball fan has seen it happen. A player catches the ball at the top of the key, and the entire defense shifts. A second defender cheats off their assignment. A third rotates to help. Somewhere on the weak side, a teammate is suddenly wide open, not because of a brilliant pass or a perfectly executed screen, but because of the sheer presence of a player.

There’s a word for this which is Gravity. It’s the invisible force that certain players exert on a defense simply by being on the court. For decades, it lived in the realm of the eye test as only something analysts could observe but never quantify.

Until now.

Gravity is an AI-powered analytic that measures the level of defensive attention a player receives including how closely they’re guarded with or without the ball to quantify the space they create for teammates. Gravity captures a player’s ability to warp a defensive scheme, highlighting athletes who generate high-value spacing, draw mismatches, and make their teammates’ jobs easier often without taking a single shot.

How it works: AI at 60 frames per second

The WNBA’s optical tracking system uses 3D pose detection to track 20 points on each player’s body at 25 frames per second. Those detailed body-position coordinates fuel the machine learning model, allowing it to capture every movement and spatial relationship on the floor.

At the core of Gravity is a comparison between two values:

• Defensive Pressure Score (DPS): The actual defensive pressure a player draws, calculated from 25 pairwise defender-to-offensive-player relationships, updated 60 times per second based on player speed, movement angles, proximity to the basket, and ball location.
• Expected Defensive Pressure Score (xDPS): A machine learning model that predicts where defenders should be positioned based solely on the offensive spacing and ball location, essentially removing the defense from the equation and asking: given where the offense is, where would an average defense stand?

The difference between actual and expected pressure is the Gravity differential measure of how much attention a player pulls from the defense beyond what the average player would receive in the same situation.

The model learns how defenders typically behave in thousands of different offensive configurations by evaluating tracking data. When a defender steps off their assignment to shade toward a star player, the model captures that deviation in real time.

The result is expressed as a normalized value on a -100 to 100 scale, with 0 reflecting the league average. A score above 80 off-ball means defenses are adjusting to you before you even touch the ball. Above 90? You’re bending the floor as a scorer the defense simply cannot take their eyes off.

Why Gravity matters for the WNBA

The WNBA has always been a league defined by basketball intelligence, precise spacing, unselfish ball movement, and players whose impact extends far beyond the box score.

Gravity captures the moment the defense collapsed toward her considering that it was a critical moment in which she created the advantage, regardless of what happens next.

Gravity gives fans and analysts a new lens to appreciate the complete player including the veteran point guard who commands a double team at half court, the post player whose seal in the paint forces help rotations and the sharpshooter whose mere presence on the wing stretches the floor for driving lanes.

With Gravity, the influence becomes measurable. And the conversation about who truly shapes a game gets sharper.

Built on a proven foundation

Gravity isn’t arriving in a vacuum. It’s the product of a multi-year innovation partnership between AWS and the full NBA portfolio. During the 2025-26 NBA season, the Inside the Game platform introduced a suite of AI-powered stats that have already reshaped how fans and broadcasters experience and talk about the game.

The platform processes billions of data points from the league’s player tracking system, running real-time inference on AWS infrastructure to deliver insights during live broadcasts, on the NBA App, NBA.com, and across social channels. The same engineering team that built these capabilities for the NBA is now bringing them to the WNBA.

“We view this partnership as integral to the next phase of growth for the WNBA,” said WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison. “From unlocking deeper insights and advanced statistics to creating more immersive fan experiences and driving innovation, we are excited to welcome AWS as a partner and Changemaker and look forward to building the future of women’s basketball together.”

What fans can expect this season

At the start of the 2026 season, Gravity will be available to fans across WNBA digital channels and integrated into live broadcasts. Fans will be able to:

• Track real-time Gravity scores during games, seeing which players are commanding the most defensive attention possession by possession,
• Explore season-long leaderboards to discover which WNBA players exert the greatest gravitational pull on opposing defenses, and
• Watch enhanced broadcast graphics that visualize how defenses react to specific players, bringing the invisible chess match of basketball to life on screen.

And this is just the beginning. The WNBA and AWS are exploring additional analytics that will continue to deepen how fans engage with the league throughout the season and beyond.

Powering what’s next in women’s basketball

This partnership is not about sponsorship visibility; it’s about visible impact. AWS is investing in what matters most to the WNBA community: growth, storytelling and access. By applying AI and cloud technology to the league’s most compelling challenges, AWS is helping the WNBA scale what’s coming next both on and off the court.

The WNBA’s 30th season is a milestone. With Inside the Game powered by AWS, it’s also a new starting point for fans who want to understand the game at a deeper level, for broadcasters who want to tell richer stories, and for a league that has always been ahead of its time.

The eye test just got smarter.