NBA refereeing is so messy

You won't believe why it isn't way better

I was in San Antonio for the 2013 NBA Finals–that’s the one that LeBron’s Heat won in seven exciting games over the Spurs–when I bumped into a well-placed guy who was fresh from the NBA’s competition committee meeting. At that time, at TrueHoop and ESPN, we were hardcore into a program we called HoopIdea, which was essentially a program of imagining how NBA rules could be improved.

Then, as now, the referees were a constant source of fan, coach, and player anxiety. You could see the referees, in HD slow motion, every game, blowing big calls. TrueHoop took hard positions in favor of more accuracy and transparency. I believe we played a role in convincing the league to, for instance, release their last two-minute report and possibly even launching the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus for the following season.

Once I got to see the replay center in action–at the time they said it had the fastest internet connection ever–it was clear that the NBA had the holy grail. At the NBA’s cheesy suburban strip mall offices in Secaucus, the bosses of the officials could command far more cameras than I ever knew were in NBA arenas, and could see dozens of angles at once, in real time, zoomed in on every millisecond of every NBA game. In the arena, it seemed wild that they said that guy had a toe on the 3-point line, in the replay center you could see the toe on the line, the drip of sweat on the floor, and the the dust motes as he placed the foot.

In that room, it’s possible to be an omniscient god of referee accuracy. And forget the tiresome delays. In that room, with the same moments blown up from many angles, all at once, they know instantly, or in seconds, every time.

We’re a full decade into not using that information. More than 10,000 NBA games have been played since they opened the replay center, all of which had blown calls the league knew about in real time, some of which decided important games.

Why don’t we use that information?