This isn’t the first time the NBA has tested a connected ball at Summer League, though; initial attempts half a decade ago fell flat. And while the technology has improved significantly since then, big hurdles remain when it comes to convincing the full body of NBA players—a notably persnickety group—that a basketball with a sensor in it won’t behave any differently than the basketballs they’re used to.
I went to Sin City and talked with stakeholders around the NBA, from teams and players to league staff and SIQ’s brain trust, to get some exclusive info about how this technology works, how testing went, and whether we should realistically expect a “smart basketball” to debut in the NBA sometime soon.
Design Evolution
While a number of nuances and variations exist within this large market, the basic construction of a basketball has remained unchanged for decades.
A combination of rounded surfaces and precisely placed grooves, the basketball is meant to bounce uniformly with a single minor exception: a small “dead” spot at the point where the ball’s air valve is inserted to maintain airtightness. When the ball is dribbled directly on that valve spot, it slightly changes the way the ball rebounds. Across decades, players at every level of the sport have simply accepted this slight imperfection as part of the game.
When the NBA first tested connected balls from multiple vendors at Summer League back in 2019, even the minuscule tweaks they made caused some issues.
For starters, connecting sensors to the interior wall of the ball created dribbling concerns.
“If you position the sensor on the inner surface of the cascade of the basketball, then you are creating a [second] dead spot like you already do with the valve,” says Maximillian Schmidt, cofounder and managing director of Kinexon, a sports data and sensor company that was among the vendors the NBA tested in 2019. “And as that was the preferred option by the corresponding ball manufacturers, the result was that there was always some kind of [additional] dead spot. It’s not preventable, no matter how small you make it.”
The sensors also simply weighed too much, largely due to both tech limitations at the time and the NBA’s initial ask that the sensors capture both ball location and ball “touch” events—a combination that required multiple sensor types built into the same setup. Players noticed both the dead spot and the added weight.
Even so, multiple parties involved in those blind 2019 tests say they actually went relatively well.
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