NBA Hiring Team to Oversee Automated Officiating

The NBA is hiring for a gig expected to take the league into the next phase of replay. 

On Tuesday night, the league posted a job for a technical lead manager, a position that is expected to build out its own team and “develop and deploy automated officiating capabilities to impact every game of the NBA season.” 

The job comes at a time when professional sports continue to lean more and more into technology to decide games. Major tennis tournaments use a fully automated Hawk-Eye system for boundary challenges; baseball is working out whether to use an automated strike zone or introduce a challenge system for balls and strikes; the NFL recently decided its optical tracking system for first downs wasn’t quite ready for prime time. European soccer is still struggling with implementing its Video Assisted Referee replay system. 

This past season marked the NBA’s first in a partnership with Sony’s Hawk-Eye and mostly used it to assist with deciding out-of-bounds and goaltending calls this past season, a source familiar with the partnership told Front Office Sports. Hawk-Eye supplies the system widely adopted by tennis and is contributing to the development of the automated strike zone in baseball.

The NBA has said before that it hopes to use Hawk-Eye to develop a system to help with calls involving boundary calls—for example, contested plays involving the three-point shot or out-of-bounds lines—and goaltending. Unlike some other sports, basketball will seemingly always require some human element to judge fouls.

A spokesperson for Hawk-Eye, which is owned by Sony, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

After a full season with the technology, the league decided to have an internal hire whose main responsibility is working with and developing new ways to implement it, the source familiar with the partnership said.

Officiating in the NBA has come under fire in recent years, especially last season, as players, coaches, and executives have all complained about inconsistent calls, questionable technical fouls, and last two-minute reports filled with missed calls. Longtime NBA referee Eric Lewis retired over an investigation into a burner account on X/Twitter and Kings coach Mike Brown brought his laptop into a postgame press conference in January after a game in Milwaukee to show examples of calls he had a problem with. 

While Hawk-Eye and whomever the NBA hires can’t fix the league’s officiating problem single-handedly, it appears to be taking another step toward improving it by building a team to deploy new systems designed to aid the officials. 

Though it’s not a requirement, the job description said “a deep understanding of officiating” is “a plus.”