This isn\u2019t the first time the NBA has tested a connected ball at Summer League, though; initial attempts half a decade ago fell flat. And while the technology has improved significantly since then, big hurdles remain when it comes to convincing the full body of NBA players\u2014a notably persnickety group\u2014that a basketball with a sensor in it won\u2019t behave any differently than the basketballs they\u2019re used to.<\/p>\n
I went to Sin City and talked with stakeholders around the NBA, from teams and players to league staff and SIQ\u2019s brain trust, to get some exclusive info about how this technology works, how testing went, and whether we should realistically expect a \u201csmart basketball\u201d to debut in the NBA sometime soon.<\/p>\n
Design Evolution<\/p>\n
While a number of nuances and variations exist within this large market, the basic construction of a basketball has remained unchanged for decades.<\/p>\n
A combination of rounded surfaces and precisely placed grooves, the basketball is meant to bounce uniformly with a single minor exception: a small \u201cdead\u201d spot at the point where the ball\u2019s air valve is inserted to maintain airtightness. When the ball is dribbled directly on that valve spot, it slightly changes the way the ball rebounds. Across decades, players at every level of the sport have simply accepted this slight imperfection as part of the game.<\/p>\n
When the NBA first tested connected balls from multiple vendors at Summer League back in 2019, even the minuscule tweaks they made caused some issues.<\/p>\n
For starters, connecting sensors to the interior wall of the ball created dribbling concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you position the sensor on the inner surface of the cascade of the basketball, then you are creating a [second] dead spot like you already do with the valve,\u201d says Maximillian Schmidt, cofounder and managing director of Kinexon, a sports data and sensor company that was among the vendors the NBA tested in 2019. \u201cAnd as that was the preferred option by the corresponding ball manufacturers, the result was that there was always some kind of [additional] dead spot. It\u2019s not preventable, no matter how small you make it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sensors also simply weighed too much, largely due to both tech limitations at the time and the NBA\u2019s initial ask that the sensors capture both ball location and ball \u201ctouch\u201d events\u2014a combination that required multiple sensor types built into the same setup. Players noticed both the dead spot and the added weight.<\/p>\n
Even so, multiple parties involved in those blind 2019 tests say they actually went relatively well.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople said there were sensors in the ball when there weren\u2019t, and people said that there were not sensors in the ball when there were,\u201d says Dayveon Ross, cofounder and CEO of ShotTracker, another vendor the NBA tested in 2019. ShotTracker\u2019s product, which includes both ball sensors and other features, has been used extensively at the college level, including across the Big 12 conference in recent years. \u201cSo it was kinda 50-50, which is exactly what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
But those 2019 tests did not ultimately result in any permanent NBA adoption of a connected ball. The issue of the ball\u2019s feel was part of that; so, too, was the league\u2019s desire to invest more of its resources at the time into computer vision programs, which could glean much of the same location data as a connected ball without the physical hassle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This isn\u2019t the first time the NBA has tested a connected ball at Summer League, though; initial attempts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[402,355,35686,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-45035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-nba","10":"tag-sensors","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}