The play, in real time to the naked eye, could have looked very close to a foul. LeBron James jumped,…
The play, in real time to the naked eye, could have looked very close to a foul. LeBron James jumped, got his right hand on the ball with a few tenths of the game’s final second left and tipped it through the basket to give the Los Angeles Lakers a win last season.
Referees on the floor rightly called it. Video replay backed up their call and the Lakers pulled off a victory over the Indiana Pacers.
It turned out not to be close at all.
The NBA has a relatively new tool called automated officiating, and the robotic eyes that now monitor just about everything on basketball courts showed that James committed nowhere near any offensive basket interference on that play. In that case, there was no need to call the shots — again, the people were right — but the NBA is increasingly using technology to ensure these types of plays are properly reviewed.
“It turns out computers are really good at this,” said Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president who oversees basketball strategy and analytics. “So if we can invest in this technology to get more targeted calls, we’re doing two things.
“First, the accuracy of those decisions is inherently increased. But we also give the human referees the freedom to not have to focus on those decisions and in turn allow them to better focus on the really difficult review actions that they are so adept at and increase accuracy even there. We think there is a double business benefit if we do this from an accuracy perspective.”
Of course, basketball isn’t the only one moving toward higher technological office.
Robot referees be 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. At many major tennis tournaments, even Wimbledon, the line judges have been replaced by electronic line calling. Football has technology to tell referees if a ball has completely crossed the goal line or if someone was offside. That could be just guesswork in real time.
It is important to note that NBA referees are not replaced. Technology only helps; instead of six human eyes on a field, it’s now six human eyes and a bunch of camera lenses there to collect as much data as the league can think of.
“Let’s do it right,” Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers said. “And let’s get on the right track faster.”
Those are the objectives, the NBA emphasizes. The use of technology aids in the flow of the game through shorter review times, aids in accuracy and also provides transparency in the ability to show computer-generated images of fans and players to explain how the calls were made.
Cameras in arenas help make accurate calls, for example along the sidelines and baseline (who was out, was the ball out of bounds, that sort of thing) and determine whether blocked shots were good or whether the goalie was involved in those plays.
“What we do is track a number of objects in space with incredible precision,” says Wasch. “We’re tracking a basketball, fingers, feet, head, hands, all 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 actually happened from a basketball perspective, based on the movement of all those things.”
The technology is not limited to calling or not calling.
Some referees wore earphones during this preseason as the league tinkered with ways to improve communication methods. There has been talk within the league about sending alerts to smartwatches about call decisions. And during this year’s summer competition, a sensor was even placed in the ball to help collect data. The sensor weighs about the same as a raisin. Hundreds of players used the ball; no one noticed that it was about a gram heavier than normal.
Ultimately, it’s about making the product better.
“There’s actually been a lot of openness from the referees and the referees’ union about the implementation of this technology,” Wasch said. “This allows them to focus on the things they are training for this job.”
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