NBA team staffers had 'contentious' call with league over Hawk-Eye concerns
Less than a day from the dawn of a new NBA season come concerns over a new technology that may not be fully ready for primetime.
In a social media post on Monday evening, Ben Dowsett of The Guardian said that team staffers had aired out their concerns over the league's implementation of Hawk-Eye, the tracking technology used in tennis and Major League Baseball to make accurate in-game officiating decisions.
On Friday, Dowsett wrote about the changeover from utilizing Second Spectrum as the league's primary provider of these advanced data points to Hawk-Eye as the latter would be used to help teams, referees and the league better gauge played and ball movements during games.
"The system will use 14 cameras placed in standardized locations around arenas, tracking 29 points on players’ bodies (arms, legs, hands, etc) plus the ball in full 3D and near-real time. This replaces a prior system most recently run by tracking company Second Spectrum, which used six cameras in arena rafters to track player torsos in 2D, or the 'dot' system, which created just a single point for each player at any given moment. From a data and visualization standpoint, this is akin to upgrading from a Super Nintendo to a VR headset. The wealth of resulting data will be found across all corners of the game; officiating will be the most immediately public-facing."
To the latter point, Hawk-Eye would act as an assistant to referees, most notably for goaltending and eventually out-of-bounds and on-the-line calls. Yet per Dowsett's reporting, there were major problems with uploading and distributing data points from preseason games, especially from the league's visit to Abu Dhabi where data from one game took two weeks to become available.
While most observers are excited to see how the various storylines of the new season will play out, the Hawk-Eye issues could play a central role in the early weeks should a theme of questionable calls arise.
Could coaches air their grievances even more than usual if there's a noticeable trend in goaltending calls? May some teams claim that they are at a disadvantage against others depending on when and how the data becomes available to their analysts? As long as there are worries that the system hasn't been properly implemented league-wide, Hawk-Eye could be the unwitting central figure to many player and coach complaints in the 2023-24 season.
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