Technology Is Coming to NBA Refereeing

The play, 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 and tapped it through the basket to give the Los Angeles Lakers a buzzer-beating win last season. Referees called it correctly. Video replay backed up their call, and the Lakers got a victory. Turns out, it wasn't close at all, reports the AP. The NBA has a relatively new tool called "automated officiating," and the robotic eyes that are now tracking basketball courts showed that James was nowhere near committing offensive basket interference. 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," says Evan Wasch, an NBA executive. "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." Basketball, of course, is not alone in veering toward higher-tech officiating. Robot umpires are getting called up to Major League Baseball next season. 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.

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 says. "And let's get right quicker." 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 says. "It lets them focus on the things that they train for this job to do."