Beginning on Saturday, NBA referees will be wearing earpieces in order to improve accuracy, the league announced on Friday.
Each referee will have an earpiece clipped to their uniform to “improve game flow and enhance officiating accuracy,” according to the NBA.
The refs will unclip the device and place it in their ears only during instant replay reviews and as needed during other clock stoppages, but not during live play.
This is the first phase of a planned two-phase program to help officials communicate in real time with the NBA Replay Center and one another.
Following an evaluation of the first phase, the second phase will see the referees wear the earpieces throughout the games — including live play. This phase is set to begin in January and run at least through the All-Star break in February.
“During the second phase, referees will be able to communicate directly with the Replay Center and each other at all times during the game,” the league said in a news release.
The technology was tested during NBA preseason games over the past two seasons, as well as in the NBA Summer League and NBA G League Winter Showcase.
Earlier this month, an explosive indictment accused basketball stars and bookies of conspiring with four of New York’s Five Families to rig illegal, high-stakes poker games across the country with high-tech devices — with threats of violence against the marks in debt to the fraudulent scheme.
The allegations unsealed in Brooklyn federal court accuse Portland Trailblazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former NBA player Damon Jones of participating in the alleged scheme alongside 30 other defendants.
Beginning in at least 2019, defendants and their co-conspirators “engaged in a complex fraud scheme to rig, or cheat at, illegal poker games” throughout the United States, where high rollers would be enticed to play alongside big names at the tables before they were bilked out of tens of thousands of dollars each game, according to prosecutors.
