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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday on an appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show" that the NBA will use some sort of Hawkeye-type technology in the future. Former Lakers legend Derek Fisher breaks down how the NBA could effectively utilize artificial intelligence to instantly resolve objective calls and speed up the game, while ensuring accuracy.
Transcript
00:00Major League Baseball has implemented a lot of technology, and earlier in the show we were
00:03talking about, you know, Adam Silver squirming a little bit to some questions that he had to
00:08answer yesterday, and I do appreciate him, you know, getting in front of him and answering them
00:12as best as he could, but the one thing he did bring up which really fascinated me was talking
00:17about using artificial intelligence to help make some calls on the court going forward.
00:24D. Fish, what do we know about this as of now? Is this good for the game? Will this help
00:31pace of play? What are the actual goals for what this is, and also just what is it?
00:37I mean, to my knowledge, and I think it's a great conversation to have, and like we can
00:42continue to have over the summer, to my knowledge, it's more about the really clearly objective
00:51calls that we should always just get right in any sport, right? Like, for example, if
00:58a player is dribbling along the sideline or the baseline, and the smallest leather piece
01:05of the basketball barely touches the out-of-bounds line, but to the human eye, maybe the official
01:11doesn't call that the ball actually touched the line. In tennis, you see this. In baseball
01:18now with the challenge system, you see like, no, the ball didn't cross the plate or it did
01:23in terms of the strike zone. And so what I believe is going to happen is that the NBA
01:29is going to move towards that type of ability to just quickly, without any type of reviews
01:35or challenges taking four minutes so that the referees can get the right angle to see if
01:41his shoelace touched the three-point line when he shot a three. That should just be an easy
01:46decision. We shouldn't have to stop the game and have to wait or go to commercial to figure out
01:51whether or not he stepped out. I could see maybe goaltending plays in terms of there's the cylinder
01:58above the rim that sometimes is officiated subjectively because depending on what angle
02:05as an official you have, when you're trying to decide if there was goaltending or not,
02:10you may be officiating that from an angle where it's not clear, bro, that ball was clearly above
02:16the cylinder like that is above the rim. So technology-wise to just clearly have that digital
02:24image of like the cylinder and whether or not the ball actually touched it at all or was above it,
02:30those are quick things to decide without coaches having to challenge whether or not it was the
02:36right call. And then it just, it keeps the game moving. It clarifies it for fans, coaches, and
02:41players that it was the right or the wrong call. Yeah. And then we can just get back to focusing
02:45on
02:45playing the game the right way. See, I love it. I love, I love when technology is implemented in sports
02:53correctly. Like I love anything that makes the games move more efficiently. And I've been saying
02:58this in baseball for years too, because now obviously baseball, after baseball spending like a hundred
03:03years in the dark ages. And I honestly, I mean that from the bottom of my heart, up until five
03:09years
03:09ago, baseball was so, so, so dead set on making sure this was an 1800s game. Thank God these last
03:18five years have happened and they've just implemented so much technology, so much more fun, so much more
03:24smoothness to the game. The way they've implemented technology, do you think baseball has like kind of
03:29given the NBA kind of like almost like a go ahead, like, no, see, we're doing it and look how
03:35much
03:35it's working. Use this. I think baseball has, you know, I think, I mean, tennis has always had it.
03:43I've always appreciated it. Oh yeah. I was confused actually. Yeah. And why more sports weren't using
03:48the in out technology that tennis has been using for years now. And so, you know, even, even watching
03:56golf, you got the shot tracer, like they, they see exactly where that golf ball, the trajectory of it,
04:01where it's landing, how far I carried in the air. And so I think this is just a move towards,
04:06I mean,
04:07in my opinion, with how much money is involved in terms of media rights, partners, you know,
04:15gambling partners, yeah. Sports betting, predictive marketing, like you, you can't have things that
04:21should be clearly black or white, right or wrong inbounds or out of bounds. Those, you can't miss
04:28those. You can't. We had one the other night that, that, that, that call that where Mitch didn't get
04:33the review that he wanted. They should have gotten the ball because it was their ball. Correct. Like
04:39you can't, you can't miss those plays. And so it also, even, even the energy around officiating
04:45could be positively impacted because the officiating will improve the more you can
04:53effectively add technology in the right ways because it takes it out of the official's hands
04:59to like look over and see at the right time that his shoe actually touched the line. Yeah. Like
05:05that's just something that doesn't, the official doesn't even have to worry about because he knows
05:09as soon as we go to commercial, that technology will confirm whether he was in or out. And then we'll
05:14have to either go and take those two points off or we'll have to add a point because it was
05:18a three
05:18or a two and it just makes it a lot cleaner experience to me. So my, my follow-up question
05:24before we wrap this up for this time being, um, what do the refs feel about this? Is this something
05:28the refs will be appreciative of or is it going to be like, will it be some pushback the way
05:33the
05:33umpires kind of had some pushback at the beginning of the season? Yeah, it'll probably be some pushback
05:37initially just because as a human, you don't necessarily want to be put in a position where everything you do
05:42is going to be under a microscope in that way. Yeah. Um, but ultimately their job is to get
05:47it right. So even if there's pushback, we'll eventually get there.
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