This is not the first time that the NBA has tested a ball connected to the Summer League; The initial attempts half a decade ago fell to the platform. And while technology has improved significantly since then, great obstacles remain when it comes to convincing the entire body of the NBA players – a particularly persenmed group – that a basketball with a sensor in it will not behave differently than the basketball they are used to.
I went to Sin City and I spoke with the interested parties around the NBA, from the teams and players to the league staff and the brain of Siq, to get some exclusive information on how this technology works, on how the tests went and if we should realistically expect an “intelligent basketball” to debut in the NBA soon.
Design evolution
While there are numerous nuances and variations within this large market, the basic construction of a basketball has remained unchanged for decades.
A combination of rounded surfaces and grooves positioned precisely, basketball aims to rebound uniformly with a single minor exception: a small “dead” point at the point where the ball air valve is inserted to maintain the air. When the ball is straight directly on that point of the valve, it slightly changes the way the ball bounces. Over the decades, players at every level of sport have simply accepted this slight imperfection as part of the game.
When the NBA tested the balls connected by the most suppliers of the Summer League in 2019 for the first time, the tiny changes they made also caused some problems.
To begin with, connecting sensors to the internal wall of the ball created dribbling concerns.
“If you place the sensor on the internal surface of the basketball waterfall, then you are creating a [second] DEAD SPOT as you already do with the valve, “says Maximillian Schmidt, co -founder and CEO of Kinexon, a sports data company and sensors that was among the sellers tested in 2019.” And like that was the favorite option by the corresponding spheres manufacturers, the result was that it was always a little type of type of type [additional] deadly point. It is not preventable, it doesn’t matter how little you do it. “
The sensors have also simply weighed too much, largely due to the technological limitations at the moment and the initial question of the NBA that the captrine sensors both the position of the ball and the “touch” events, a combination that has requested multiple types of sensors integrated in the same configuration. The players noticed both the deadly point and the weight added.
Even so, more parts involved in those blind tests of 2019 say that they actually went relatively well.
“People said there were sensors in the ball when they weren’t there, and people said there were no sensors in the ball when they were there,” says Dayveon Ross, co -founder and shottracker CEO, another seller that the NBA tested in 2019. Shottracker, which includes both the sensors of the ball and other features, was used extended to the university level, included through large conferences. “So it was a little 50 -50, which is exactly what you want.”
But those tests of 2019 have not ultimately entailed any permanent adoption of the NBA of a connected ball. The question of the sensation of the ball was part of this; The same applies to the desire of the League to invest more than its resources at that moment in artificial vision programs, which could collect most of the same position data as a ball connected without physical drying.