NBA commissioner Adam Silver speaks during press conference at the Emirates NBA Cup Final at T-Mobile Arena.
Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
Fixing the NBA’s officiating system is the next major project the league commissioner, Adam Silver, has taken on this summer. During the NBA Global Games in Macao, Commissioner Silver spoke to CNBC about the potential use of wearable devices for purposes like assessing the subjective contact element of officiating in the future or other potential uses
“Wearables are something we’ve been having ongoing negotiations with the Players’ Association about. It’s interesting, because players have something on them when they’re warming up or when they’re in their day-to-day lives or to monitor sleep like a lot of us do.”
“We haven’t come to an agreement with the Players’ Association yet on how to use them in games. There’s a lot of sensitivity, especially from the Players’ Union, about how that data might be used,” Adam Silver explained.
“I guess if you could just see if a player is slowing down or something like that, they’re worried that could be used in bargaining, and I get that. So I guess we have to come to some agreement on how the information has to be used.”
“So it seems to me that everybody wants that information; it’s just the situation that players are in now when they’re essentially wearing wearables 22 hours a day, but the only time they’re not wearing them is when they’re in a game, so that can’t make sense, so we’ll work something out with them,” Silver concluded.
In essence, NBA players fear that if teams get access to a player’s personal data, they can skew anything, even negligibly, in their favor. This means they can use it as leverage in contract negotiations, which may end up making a difference of multiple million dollars between what a player expects and what a team offers.
The NBA has gone through several major, unusual situations this summer, including the Kawhi Leonard salary-cap circumvention scandal, league expansion, and changes to lottery odds to counter teams intentionally tanking their season.
And amid all the chaos, Commissioner Adam Silver also announced his plans to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) into officiating so that human officials can focus on subjective contact-based situations, and not basic decisions like whether a player or the ball is out of bounds and whether a shot is a two- or a three-pointer.
Ultimately, Silver will have to balance players’ concerns about data privacy with advances in officiating technology. A deal could modernize the NBA without jeopardizing players’ financial interests. It remains to be seen whether Adam Silver and the Players’ Association can find a new middle ground.