The Finals Are Over. Here Is How the NBA Uses Technology to Make the Game Look Cooler

For a league as commercial as the NBA, ratings sometimes matter more than who wins, and technology is how it raises them.

Regular article

The 2014-2015 NBA Finals have just ended. The best team, the Golden State Warriors, beat the best player, LeBron James, and the series set a ratings record along the way: an average of 19.2 million people watched each game, and 23.3 million watched the last one. That is the highest figure since 1998, when Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls against the Utah Jazz.

For a league as commercial as the NBA, ratings sometimes matter more than who wins. So to make its games look more intense and exciting, whether you are in the arena or in front of a TV, the NBA spends heavily on new technology every year, all to make the game cooler.

We have rounded up the NBA's coolest new technologies. Some of them appeared in these Finals.

The court: the floor becomes a screen

Leaving aside the hard collisions of the games themselves, the 3D light show projected onto the court before Game 3 of the Finals drew plenty of attention too. During the show the floor looked as if it had been laid loosely over a huge pit: the planks flipped, sank and rose, and it looked convincingly real. Then the floor seemed to turn into a giant movie screen, replaying classic moments from past games, as thrilling as any blockbuster.

The show was made with the help of a company called Quince Imaging. Before the game, it mounted a large number of very powerful projectors on the arena's roof beams. By aiming them from different angles and throwing light of different brightness, it could create a 3D light show like this one.

This is not the first time the NBA has used Quince Imaging's light shows to make its games cooler, but each time the crowd gasps. In fact, the NBA has never stopped using the latest technology to make itself cooler, and each new technology really has made the game more fun.

The broadcast: watching the NBA like watching The Matrix

For most viewers, the most visible changes come from the technology used in TV broadcasts. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is a technology enthusiast to begin with, and he spares no effort to give viewers the best broadcast possible. He installed the league's first FreeD system (a 360-degree camera technology) in the Mavericks' home, the American Airlines Center, to supply TV broadcasts with high-resolution, 360-degree 3D images.

Describing the terms gets you nowhere. Better to see for yourself what a broadcast looks like with FreeD.

A broadcast clip produced with FreeD technology

Pretty cool, isn't it? The principle behind it is not very complicated. First, many high-definition cameras are installed around the arena to capture the action at every moment. FreeD has its own algorithm that places every pixel the cameras capture in real three-dimensional space. In other words, every pixel gets a 3D coordinate. With those coordinates, FreeD can rebuild the footage from all the cameras into a 3D image, and so, as in the clip above, it can show any moment of the game from any angle.

How FreeD technology works

The company that developed FreeD is called Replay Technologies, and as the name suggests, it specializes in replay technology for sports. FreeD is still its main product. It comes in two versions, depending on how much ground it needs to cover: the SOLO freeD System and the ARENA freeD System. The first reconstructs a single fixed spot in 3D, which suits the instant a batter hits the ball in baseball. The second covers a much larger area; at a football game it can cover the entire field.

The technology has not yet caught on widely, though. In the NBA, only one All-Star Game and the Dallas Mavericks have installed the system.

Virtual reality: a courtside seat without going to the arena

Virtual reality sounds even cooler than FreeD, so many companies already want to tie it to the NBA.

At this year's All-Star Weekend, Samsung, the NBA's official technology partner, brought in three different virtual reality companies to shoot a large amount of virtual reality footage of the All-Star Game.

The most impressive was the All-Star Game footage BigLook360 shot for Samsung and the NBA. BigLook360 did not use any elaborate filming technology. It simply combined existing high-definition technology with 4K cameras: using a few GoPro cameras already installed in the arena and a RED Epic camera set up in the front row, it produced fairly high-quality virtual reality footage.

Even so, shooting virtual reality in an NBA arena is still quite hard. The camera operators had to squeeze their way past all kinds of conventional broadcast equipment. Unlike a regular TV crew, they could not set up a workstation of their own, so they had to keep checking the cameras' batteries and the space left on their memory cards. They also had to tell people who wandered into the shot: "Sir, please don't stand in front of the camera."

A camera used to shoot virtual reality footage

After all that trouble, the footage BigLook360 and Samsung produced is pretty good. Sorry, though: we cannot show you what they actually shot, because to watch these All-Star videos you need your own Samsung Gear VR, which is a big mask that straps over your eyes.

Samsung's virtual reality headset

The process is complicated, but the NBA is still working hard to broadcast games in virtual reality. Here is the main reason.

Watching the NBA in person, especially from the best seats, in the row just behind the players' bench, lets you see basketball from extremely close up.

That sets the NBA apart from other sports. In soccer and football, spectators can only watch from far away, high up in the stands.

So the NBA's virtual reality footage is meant to give every viewer that close-up view. If the technology works out, then even when we watch on TV, it will be as if we had bought the most expensive ticket in the house. Just thinking about it is a little exciting.

SportVU: the right way for stats fans to watch the NBA

Besides the technologies and changes we fans can see for ourselves, the NBA also uses some technologies we don't notice, yet they really do improve the fan experience. Many fans, for example, are stats junkies who like to use numbers to rank players against one another.

Do you know where those numbers come from? They used to be tallied laboriously by hand, so mistakes and gaps were unavoidable. To cut down on errors, the NBA adopted a technology called Synergy Sports Technology in 2008. But that system was soon replaced by a more advanced player-tracking technology, SportVU.

SportVU also uses cameras, six of them installed around the arena, to track the players and the ball 25 times per second. The result can be visualized like the picture below.

A SportVU visualization of the action in a game

With a picture like this, tracking player statistics becomes much easier. And the system can provide far more data, and far more complex data, than we might imagine. Here is an example.

According to SportVU's analysis of the Golden State Warriors, in the 20 games in which the Warriors made the most passes per possession, they averaged 1.075 points per possession and went 16-4. In the 20 games with the fewest passes per possession, they averaged only 1.053 points per possession, and their record slid to 9-11. So the Warriors should move the ball on offense. That is the kind of data SportVU can provide, and what that data can do.

In fact, SportVU produces so much data that even team executives are somewhat at a loss. The data system they use gives them less than 10% of everything SportVU provides. In other words, even seasoned team executives are still working out how to use it.

SportVU is also catching on with NBA teams. In the 2009-10 season, only 4 teams were willing to be SportVU's guinea pigs; a year later, two more joined the trial. By the 2012-2013 season, 15 teams had started using SportVU. Now almost every NBA arena has the system installed, and SportVU has become standard equipment for NBA teams.

Catapult: keeping every player healthy

SportVU mainly tracks how players perform on the court; how they are doing off it can be left to another technology, Catapult. Catapult is an Australian company that makes wearable monitoring devices for athletes. The device fits into an athlete's uniform without getting in the way of movement.

It tracks running, jumping, squatting, turning and a range of physiological measures, collects and analyzes the data 1,000 times per second, and sends it to the coach's screen in real time. The picture below is a typical Catapult data chart.

A chart Catapult generates from a player's movement

The biggest benefit of Catapult is that teams can monitor players' physical condition and schedule rest based on what the data shows, so that players don't get hurt in high-intensity games and drag down the team's record.

The downside is that it can anger fans. In March this year, the Warriors used Catapult data to decide to rest four players, including Stephen Curry. Fans who had paid for tickets specifically to watch Curry play were unhappy.

One fan replied to head coach Steve Kerr on Twitter:

"Today is my son's 7th birthday, and we spent $250 to see Curry, only to watch you keep him on the bench. Thanks, Steve."

But the complaint is a little one-sided. In a few games, Catapult's data may lead a coach to bench a star, which makes that game less worth watching. Over the long run, though, it protects those stars, extends their careers, makes the whole team stronger and makes the season as a whole better to watch. After all, most of us have watched a favorite player lose a season to injury and never get back to his best. Catapult's data can keep that from happening, which is good for fans too.

The Replay Center: no more worrying about bad calls

Another technology making the NBA cooler comes from upgraded arena hardware. In the 2014-2015 season, the NBA spent $15 million to build a huge Replay Center.

Before the Replay Center existed, replays were handled by the broadcast trucks of the local TV stations in each NBA city. But replays were not those stations' top priority; their main job was making sure the broadcast looked good. On top of that, referees sometimes did not know enough about a disputed play and had to check repeatedly to work out which shots they needed to see again. So referees often took a long time to reach a ruling.

To cut the time referees spend on disputed plays, and to make their rulings more accurate, the NBA finally decided to build the Replay Center. It connects to all 29 NBA arenas in the United States, with 94 high-definition cameras monitoring every game and 20 staffed workstations watching every move on the court. Its processing system handles up to 300 billion bits of information per second, fast enough to download the more than 158 million items in the entire Library of Congress in 30 minutes.

Here is how the Replay Center works. At every workstation, a staff member monitors a game live. When something happens (say, a player shoots near the three-point line), that staff member is immediately on alert. When the referees on the court signal that they want to review a play, he operates the Replay Center's system and sends an edited clip to the scorer's table at the game. The referees then make their ruling based on the footage.

Inside the Replay Center

Under current NBA rules, there are 15 situations in which referees on the court can ask the Replay Center for a replay, including suspected technical fouls, physical altercations between players, buzzer-beaters and shots near the three-point line.

Since the Replay Center came into service, NBA referees have become noticeably more efficient. According to the NBA's figures for the 2014-2015 regular season, referees relied on the Replay Center for 2,162 rulings, at 42.1 seconds each, 50% less time than the season before. Accuracy improved as well: in 1,596 of the 2,162 rulings, the referees on the court made a call first and then used the Replay Center to check it, and 307 of those calls were reversed after the referees watched the Replay Center's video.

So the Replay Center has indeed cut the time referees need to make a ruling and made their decisions more accurate, which in turn makes NBA games fairer and smoother.

The whistle: crucial when every second counts

Finally, a few little-known facts about arena hardware.

First, NBA referees do not use ordinary whistles. The NBA has fitted several small sensors inside them. The moment a referee blows the whistle, the game clock stops automatically. To restart play, the referee only has to press a small button on his waistband.

The NBA is this fussy about whistles because basketball is a race against the clock. In a close game (especially one tied in the last minute of the fourth quarter), any second can decide the outcome. So the NBA needs to keep time with great precision.

Before sensor technology, the NBA had to train people specially to stop the clock quickly after the whistle. But people are never perfectly precise, so there was always some error. Putting sensors in the whistle removes the human error. Even if it is still not perfect, it beats doing it by hand.

The breakaway rim: guardian of the backboard

You may also have noticed the rim bending slightly when a player dunks hard. You have probably guessed the purpose of this design: to stop players from shattering the backboard.

The rim bends slightly as Howard dunks

In the 1960s and 70s, shattered backboards were nothing unusual. Darryl Dawkins was one notorious backboard-wrecker. In November 1979, in two games, against the Kansas City Kings, as they then were, and the San Antonio Spurs, he shattered two different backboards. Far from being ashamed, he was proud of it, and gave one of those dunks a name: The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam.

Faced with such brazen behavior, the NBA quickly issued a rule: from then on, shattering a backboard during a game would count as a foul, and the league would impose fines and suspensions depending on the circumstances.

Penalties treated the symptom, not the cause. To solve the problem for good, the NBA also changed the hardware. In the 1981-82 season, the NBA adopted the breakaway rim that Arthur Ehrat had developed in 1975, a rim that bends slightly when a player dunks hard. The technology greatly reduced the number of shattered backboards, but it could not prevent them entirely. The most recent case we could find was in 2012, when Joey Dorsey shattered a backboard at an NBA preseason exhibition game in Italy. And in 2013 and 2014, the Chinese players Zhai Xiaochuan and Yi Jianlian each earned the title of "backboard breaker" in practice.

Of the technologies described here, some improve the experience of watching on TV, some can change how NBA teams are run, and others make the games more exciting through better hardware. They work in different areas and are changing every part of the NBA: the teams, the arenas and the fans. And through these changes, the NBA is becoming cooler and more captivating.