In the NBA, arbitration is often questioned. We remember this season the LeBron James affair against the Celtics or the recent comments by Fred VanVleet on the officials. To remedy this, Adam Silver talks about including Hawk-Eye technology to help referees in their decision-making.
To put an end to certain arbitration controversies, the commissioner of the NBA therefore wishes to set up a new system to help its officials thanks to Hawk-Eye technology. The big bald maintains that:
“This technology will improve refereeing by increasing the accuracy of decisions and the speed of play, including, in the coming seasons, automated decisions on game facts such as field trips and goaltending. ”
The NBA plans to add a Hawk-Eye
“This technology will provide the opportunity to enhance officiating by increasing the accuracy of calls and the speed of gameplay, including, in future seasons, through automated calls on plays such as out-of-bounds and goaltending,”
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— NBACentral (@TheNBACentral) March 9, 2023
The “Hawk-Eye” technological service is indeed very efficient. For tennis fans, you can already see it in the biggest tournaments. This is a system that indicates whether the ball is fair or foul by calculating its trajectory using the images collected by the ten cameras placed around the field. The machines used have a precision much greater than that of a human eye. You can imagine that if this tool manages to do it with a tennis ball, for him a basketball is a joke.
If this technology were to arrive in the NBA, it would save referees a lot of time and anger players less. Because you can’t contradict the machine in 99.99% of cases. No more endless waiting to know if it was the player of team A or B who touched the ball last. There, in less than ten seconds, we know for whom the throw-in is in the event of a dispute. All that remains is to regulate its use in the NBA. Could we have unlimited access? With a specific number of challenges? It’s up to Adam Silver to decide. In tennis, each player has three challenges. If that one is conclusive, he keeps it, otherwise he loses it.
If in tennis this technology used since 2002 works very well in its simplest version, its new, much more advanced and automated update is highly criticized. Among other things because of the dehumanization of the playing space, even making the chair umpire useless. But we are talking about an individual sport where the public cannot express themselves during the exchange, which affects the spectacle side. In the NBA, we should not find this disadvantage. We would still need the three referees for the other types of fouls. American venues can and know how to set the mood throughout the entire game. And then we talk about a collective sport with necessarily more interactions. So unless the machine starts to bug, there is little chance that this arbitration innovation will be a failure.
This innovation will reduce the time of matches by a few minutes and especially the moments when the referees look at the same action 20 times to know who to return the ball to. In the middle of the night, it’s already a win.
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Source texte : The Associated Press