Big David will be watching them...

[JetMetFan]

From Grantland...

The NBA will officially announce Thursday what Grantland reported two weeks ago — that the league will pay for the installation of data-tracking cameras, and the attached software, at all 29 NBA arenas (the Clippers and Lakers share an arena). This is a sort of endgame for STATS, proprietor of the SportVU camera technology, which entered the league in the 2010-11 season with a half-dozen eager subscribing teams. I’ve written about the technology several times, so I won’t go deep into the basics here. Suffice it to say the cameras track the movement of every object on the court — players, referees, the ball — several times per second, providing a new path to answering questions small and grand.

The potential impact on our understanding of the game, of its flow and X's-and-O's, is fascinating. The NBA has become the first major U.S. sports league, and perhaps the first in the world, to invest this heavily in motion-tracking. But the cameras will touch on lots of other areas of profound importance to basketball’s future that have gotten short shrift amid the hoops-related curiosity.

Officiating
Half the league’s teams had already purchased the camera systems at about $100,000 per year. The league's move to pay for the remaining 15 teams caught a lot of folks close to the process by surprise. It won’t tout it, but one reason the league acted fast was to immediately enhance its ability to monitor referees — always a touchy subject. The cameras represent the most precise way to grade the three on-court officials based on how consistently and early they get into the league’s three set positions — called “lead,” “slot,” and “trail” — and whether they make appropriate calls from those positions based on their exact sight lines. This is the next stage in seeing which officials are the best, and thus deserving of high-stakes assignments, and in quantifying that in ways that are hard to dispute.

“We will use whatever data and means we can to improve our referees,” says Steve Hellmuth, the NBA’s executive vice president of operations and technology. “The refs haven’t been tracked before. Now for the first time, they will be.”

The league has already started using the cameras to check on the enforcement of defensive three-second violations out of concern that defensive players routinely break the rule by lingering in the lane too long. (The results of said studies are inconclusive so far, say several sources familiar with the inquiry.) One catch: It’s unclear if the league will share any referee-related data with the subscribing teams. “I don’t think we’ve thought about that at this point,” Hellmuth says.

The league has long hoarded data on which individual referees make particular foul calls, something you won’t find in the play-by-play and a key piece of information a few teams have paid outside consultants to track.

The plan for now appears to be for the league to keep the camera-related referee data to itself, a move that will not please teams.

[Raymond]

Originally Posted by JetMetFan

From Grantland...

...
The plan for now appears to be for the league to keep the camera-related referee data to itself, a move that will not please teams.

The teams need to worry about what players are doing. The NBA has staff in place to address the officials.

These cameras do really amazing things, but I think the thing that will affect NBA officials the most is tracking of speed. These cameras can track a players speed running up and down the court, and I am sure they will use that feature on officials as well. With so much emphasis being put on fitness and getting to the right position, I expect speed to be the tiebreaker between two similarly skilled officials.

[JRutledge]

Well David will not even be around the entire season. So I think the officials are safe.

Peace

[dominicvincey]

When did this take place? Was it last season?

[Andy]

Originally Posted by BadNewsRef

The teams need to worry about what players are doing. The NBA has staff in place to address the officials.

What would be the purpose of the teams having the referee data?

...other than to bitch about specific officials, of course...

[Welpe]

Originally Posted by Andy

...other than to bitch about specific officials, of course...

That would probably be why.

Also I imagine they could potentially develop certain strategies if they know the tendencies of the officials working.