NBA commissioner Adam Silver has confirmed the league intends to introduce artificial intelligence to handle out-of-bounds decisions in games.
Silver made the announcement during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Wednesday, outlining the league’s vision for automated officiating.
“In terms of replay,” Silver told McAfee, “We’re going to get to the point fairly quickly where, for example, out of bounds, we’re going to move to a system like [the Hawk-Eye system in professional tennis] where that whole category of calls will be automatic.”
Silver described how the system would function in practice, with cameras positioned around the court feeding decisions directly to an automated process.
“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,” Silver said.
Silver added that the system would remove so-called objective calls entirely from the hands of referees, making the process instantaneous during live play.
“It’ll take all of those so-called objective calls out of the hands of the referees,” Silver said. “It’ll be instantaneous, it’ll be automatic, just play on.”
The commissioner believes freeing referees from these decisions would allow them to focus entirely on the subjective calls involving contact and foul determinations that cameras cannot measure.
Silver stopped short of committing to a specific timeline, saying only that the transition would happen “fairly quickly” without naming a target season for implementation.
Those hoping the technology arrives for next season may need to temper their expectations, with the league likely to trial the system in the G League before rolling it out at the NBA level.
That process would realistically take at least one additional full season before the technology reaches the main stage on a consistent basis.
The NBA is believed to have drawn confidence from MLB’s introduction of its Automated Ball-Strike system, which has been implemented this season across the league.
Unlike the ABS system in baseball, which has been noted to lengthen game times, an automated out-of-bounds system in the NBA is expected to actually speed up games by removing the need for lengthy reviews of such calls.
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