The play, in real time to the naked eye, might have looked very close to a violation. LeBron James leaped, got his right hand on the ball with a few tenths of the game’s final second remaining and tapped it through the basket to give the Los Angeles Lakers a buzzer-beating win last season.
Referees on the floor called it correctly. Video replay backed up their call, and the Lakers got a victory over the Indiana Pacers.
Turns out, it wasn’t close at all.
The NBA has a relatively new tool called “automated officiating,” and the robotic eyes that are now tracking just about everything on basketball courts showed that James was nowhere near committing offensive basket interference on that play. It wasn’t needed to decide matters in that case — again, the humans got it right — but the NBA is tapping into technology more and more to ensure that plays like those get adjudicated correctly.
“Turns out, computers are really good at this,” said Evan Wasch, an NBA executive vice president overseeing basketball strategy and analytics. “So, if we can invest in this technology to get more calls right on the objective ones, we do two things.
“One, the accuracy on those calls, by definition, goes up. But we also free up the human referees to not have to focus on those calls and in turn allow them to focus more closely on the really difficult judgment plays that they’re so adept at and actually increase accuracy there, too. We think there’s what we call double bottom-line benefit to doing this from an accuracy perspective.”
Basketball, of course, is not alone in veering toward higher-tech officiating.
Robot umpires are getting called up to Major League Baseball next season; humans will still make the calls, but teams can challenge ball or strike calls and an automated system will determine if those challenges were successful. Many major tennis tournaments, even Wimbledon, have replaced line judges with electronic line-calling. Soccer has technology to tell referees if a ball fully crossed a goal line or if someone was offsides, calls that in real time might just be guesswork.
It’s important to note that NBA referees are not being replaced. Technology is just helping; instead of six human eyes on a court, it’s now six human eyes and a whole lot of camera lenses that are there to collect as much data as the league can think of.
“Let’s get it right,” Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers said. “And let’s get right quicker.”
Those are the goals, the NBA insists. Using technology helps with game flow thanks to shorter review times, helps with the accuracy and also provides transparency in the ability to show fans and players computer-generated images to explain how calls were made.
Cameras in arenas are helping to precisely make calls such as the ones along sidelines and baselines — who was a ball off, was it out of bounds, that sort of thing — as well as determining if blocked shots were good or was goaltending committed on those plays.
“What we’re doing is tracking a bunch of objects in space with incredible precision,” Wasch said. “We are tracking a basketball, fingers, feet, heads, hands, all the parts of the body. We’re tracking them in space with cameras and sensors. And there’s an element of machine learning and artificial intelligence to build those algorithms on top of that to then know what in fact happened from a basketball perspective based on the movement of all those things.”
The technology isn’t limited to calls or non-calls.
Some referees have been wearing earpieces during this preseason as the league tinkers with ways for better communication methods. There’s been talk at the league of sending alerts to smartwatches about decisions on calls. And at summer league this year, there was even a sensor placed inside the ball to help collect data. The sensor weighs about the same as a raisin does. Hundreds of players used the ball; nobody noticed that it was about a gram heavier than usual.
In the end, it’s all about making the product better.
“There’s actually been a ton of openness from the referees and the referee union on implementing this technology,” Wasch said. “It lets them focus on the things that they train for this job to do.”
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