Hawk-Eye is hoping to provide NBA officials with special wearable equipment to speed up the call-making process
THE NBA is working to improve officiating with the help of cutting-edge Hawk-Eye technology — as Commissioner Adam Silver promised during the 2024 NBA Finals.
The league has been testing the company’s tracking and multi-angle replay systems, allowing the referees to make faster and more informed calls by automating part of the decision-making process.
The NBA is testing Hawk-Eye’s groundbreaking technology to improve officiating in the gameCredit: Damian Burchardt, The U.S. Sun
The company’s advanced tracking system can soon provide the refs with automated callsCredit: Damian Burchardt, The U.S. Sun
Hawk-Eye has already changed the officiating in tennis, soccer, and cricketCredit: Sportsfile – Subscription
The technology will also provide networks with stunning visuals, taking a contested play into the virtual world and showing it from different angles so the viewers can understand why a call was made.
Hawk-Eye has changed the officiating and game broadcast in several major sports since it first launched in 1999.
Most known for its ball-tracking technology utilized in tennis, the Sony-owned company has made an impact in cricket and, more recently, soccer.
It is behind the video assistant referee (VAR) system and the automation of goal line calls, implemented in most major domestic and international soccer competitions over the past decade.
The NBA partnered with Hawk-Eye about five years ago, initially seeking to aid the officials in goaltending situations, Hawk-Eye product manager for the NBA tracking system Sam Bourne told The U.S. Sun during the 2024 Las Vegas Summer League.
The league’s Replay Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, started using the company’s ball-tracking metrics that follow a shot’s trajectory and predict its impact on the rim during the 2023-24 season.
There, officials can now see the in-game feed with markers indicating whether the ball has reached its apex, if it has a chance to go in the basket, and whether it’s inside or outside of the cylinder of the rim.
But Silver, 62, confirmed at the start of the 2024 Finals that the league is looking to expand its usage of the technology in the coming years.
The NBA put some of the innovations to the test during the Summer League, which has served as a testing ground for Hawk-Eye since the partnership began.
Hawk-Eye had 16 cameras located around the court at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center, including two ultra-high frame cameras that capture footage at a 480 frame-per-second rate.
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The setup generated tracking points on the ball and the players — 29 on every hooper — while recognizing the color of their jerseys so the system could accurately collect data for each person on the court.
The information could be used for performance analysis, including an analysis of a player’s game load and levels of tiredness, Bourne noted.
Hawk-Eye experimented with a more advanced feed featuring another layer of logic to flag in-game events in real time based on the collected data.
The upgraded system included a timeline that showed when goaltending occurred or the ball went out of bounds.
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“That’s what we’ve been kind of working on for a significant amount of time — getting the ability to just automatically detect goaltend,” Bourne said.
The Replay Center had access to the timeline in Vegas, although didn’t use the system to make calls yet, Bourne noted.
Those automated goaltending decisions could be used for officiating purposes in the Replay Center as soon as next season, though, the Hawk-Eye manager added.
“The goaltending stuff is kind of reaching game-ready state,” Bourne said.
The NBA could also run trials with the automated out-of-bound prompts, but those likely won’t be utilized for call-making purposes for another year or two.
The end goal is to have the referees wear a special watch on their wrist, alerting them of the automated decisions, Bourne said.
The system is already used in soccer with officials being notified when the ball crosses the goal line to determine whether to award a score to a team.
Hawk-Eye will also eventually provide the NBA’s broadcast partners and in-arena producers with a visual representation of the play in question, generated by the collected data points.
In Vegas, the company already was able to generate a graphic that showed the ball in or outside a virtual cylinder of the rim from different angles in a backboard goaltending situation.
The tests are ongoing, allowing Hawk-Eye and the NBA to fine-tune the tracking system — which has a margin of error of about 0.1 inch in tennis — taking into consideration the fast-paced nature of the game.
The recent addition of the two ultra-high-frame cameras is an example of the two sides’ commitment to perfection.
Hawk-Eye installed those after finding out that a higher FPS feed was necessary to deliver the highest accuracy possible in backboard goaltending calls.
“We want to make [the game] fairer,” Bourne said.
“We want to make sure that [calls are] not down to a human interpretation and there’s actually consistency across all decisions.”
