Over the next six months, the NBA is going to be reviewing the officiating in an attempt to enhance the performance and add 25 percent more NBA referees, according to NBA.com. The review will be done by the president of league, Bruce Spruell.
Some ideas the league has is to increase the amount of officials by 25 percent over the next three years, rewrite the rulebook, have data reviews, use virtual reality as a training technique, and have coach evaluations.
With an increase in referees, the league will look to add international, college, and D-League refs, and they could even look to former players as potential referees.
“A larger staff would allow the league to have what Spruell called “game administrators,” who would sit courtside and communicate between the game officials and the Replay Center. And it would have more refs in place if the league ever decides to have more than the current three-person crew calling games. It has experimented with four- and five-man crews in the D-League, which will continue.”
Both the MLB and NFL have crews that work together throughout the season, and the NBA will look to see if that could be an option for them going forward. Spruell said the idea behind this is that it could help chemistry between the refs and also cut back on the amount of moving around the country the NBA referees do.
The NBA started this all by adding the two minute report the day after games, but want to continue to improve their product.