Officiating has been a massive subject of conversation surrounding the NBA. That has come in the form of flopping and embellishing contact and has devolved all the way to questioning the impartiality of the referees in commissioner Adam Silver’s league.
Fans typically underestimate how hard it is to officiate NBA games and how stellar most referees in today’s game are. However, Silver is understanding of some of the complaints, and is looking to move to a system where certain calls — like out of bounds — are determined automatically without the use of on-court officials.
“I will also add one other piece to it, because I know there’s always controversy around certain calls,” Silver said on The Pat McAfee Show. “There’s one you were talking about on your show earlier today, and I think in terms of replay, we’re gonna get to the point fairly quickly where… for example, out of bounds, the very play you were talking about. Just like if you’re a tennis fan and they have the thing called Hawkeye, and it’s the animation… and you quickly see where the line was and the ooh’s and ahh’s of the crowd of it touched the line or it was out of bounds. We’re gonna move to a system like that where that whole category of calls will be automatic.
“Where it’s gonna be Laker ball, Knick ball, Thunder ball. Those calls will be done by an AI-automated system with cameras lined around the court and it’ll take all those so-called objective calls out of the hands of the referees. It’ll be instantaneous, it’ll be automatic, play on let’s go Spurs inbound. You won’t have to do challenges on those calls, but it will also allow the officials on the more difficult, subjective calls to give their full attention to those. Because there’s often contact on every play, it doesn’t mean there’s a foul, and they’re trying to measure sort of whether that contact is impeding a player, how hard that contact is impeding a player.
“It’s something that can’t just be done on camera, there’s actually feeling the contact because they’re on the floor with the players. Anyways, I think technology will really be helpful here.”
This could be a very positive thing for the league for all the reasons Silver mentioned. Officials today are fantastic at their jobs, but with the amount that they need to be on the lookout for, sometimes there are blatant misses that either can’t be reviewed, or feel like a waste of a challenge from the coaches.
Removing those objective calls — similar to tennis — from the on-court refs allows them to focus on the subjective while ensuring that those calls will always be accurate. Silver doesn’t say exactly when that system will be implemented, but this level of detail hints that it could be soon.
Lakers lay off employees from several departments
It was reported on Wednesday that the Lakers are laying off more than a dozen employees from various departments — including marketing, team communications, team content and corporate partnerships — as a part of a reorganization under new owner Mark Walter.
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