Starting last season, the Los Angeles Lakers began testing out a new way to better track the health and performance of their players. To do so, they culled data from multiple devices and methods and fed it into a formula that charted the players in green, yellow or red zones. As you'd expect, green is good, yellow is caution and red is bad.

More information about how the Lakers gather information is available in our story that details the Lakers' efforts toward injury prevention, but one of the key elements is SportVU -- six military-grade cameras that capture the movements of the basketball, all 10 players on the court and the three referees 25 frames per second throughout a game.

SportVu has certain limitations as a way to measure exertion -- built on cameras in the rafters, it knows little about taxing things like jumping or colliding with others, for instance. However, SportVu is revolutionary for tracking players’ speed and distance covered, and the Lakers believe that can help them make smart choices about when to rest players to minimize injury and maximize performance.

"So we’re going to take average speed, we’re going to multiply the distance, we’re going to multiply that by their body weight -- average speed times distance times body weight,” says Lakers head trainer Gary Vitti. “That’s going to give us a number that we call ‘load.’

“Then we’re going to take the load and we’re going to divide that by the minutes that the player played and that’s going to give us another number that we call ‘intensity.’

“So theoretically, you want a direct linear relationship between load and intensity. As the load is going up, you want intensity to go up with it. And as long as that’s happening, we put that player in the green zone, meaning we can keep pushing him. If load is going up, and intensity is starting to flatten, then he’s going into the yellow zone and now he has our attention. What do we need to do? He’s starting to flatten, his performance is going down, he’s not moving as efficiently. If load is going up and intensity is starting to tank, now you’re in the red zone and we’ve got to do something.”

So has the system worked? The answer is tricky.

“I don’t know how you determine if it’s working, because if an injury never happens, then you don’t know why it happened,” says Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak. “But it’s not important at that point. If the guy is not injured and you’re doing something technology-wise, then you don’t change it.”

Says Vitti, “Now if we’ve got a guy in the red zone and he goes out and has 50 points and has the best game of his life, obviously what we’re doing is bulls--t. But it hasn’t happened that way. The predictive nature of what we’re doing is actually linear to what’s happening on the court.”

The Lakers won’t reveal injury information about specific players. But, generally speaking, was there any point in which Vitti informed Lakers head coach Byron Scott about a player who was in the red zone and Scott then scaled back?

“Yeah. Definitely,” Scott says.