Have you ever been frustrated with how long it takes referees to review a play? Minutes feel like hours as fans anxiously await the verdict. This season the National Basketball Association is putting an end to this frustration.
“Here was the issue that we wanted to solve,” said NBA’s Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology, Steve Hellmuth.
“The referees would huddle, come over to courtside. By the time they got there, frequently the broadcasters and the production guys had already shown the answer maybe three or four times. Then [the officials] are looking at the video and our referees are looked upon as slowing things down. It’s, ‘Why don’t they know. I already know.’ Well, now during that time interval, we’re going to be working with the video.”
With the introduction of a new technology center, referees will be better equipped to make a quick and correct decision.
“The new state-of-the-art NBA Replay Center will not only help our officials get more calls correct by giving them enhanced views of the action, but will also help them do their jobs in a more expeditious manner,” said Rod Thorn, NBA’s President of Basketball Operations.
[fanmob id=”d9cc9d15-40e1-4664-a97a-3356bf5c1326″]
Featuring 94 television screens and 20 replay stations, the NBA Replay Center will create a streamlined review process that hopes to eliminate long review delays. Multiple camera angles will be pieced together and instantaneously streamed to the referee crew chief on the court who will ultimately make the call.
According to USA Today, the capacity of this new network is 66 times the size of the previous one, with about 28 terabytes of data moving through on a busy night. Three Replay Managers will oversee all of the action in the command center. Additionally, each game being played will have a dedicated Replay Operator, who will monitor referee signals and create the enhanced replay stream using split screens, zoom, and camera angles from every production vehicle in the arena.
Introduction of the new NBA Replay Center comes on the heels of other early adopters of centralized review, including the NHL’s Situation Room and MLB’s Replay Operations Center.