This Smart Basketball Tracks Data About Every Shot. It Could Be Headed to the NBA

WIRED

6 days ago

The league is considering adopting the tech for in-game use. Since the sensor is in the valve stem, the ball dribbles, shoots, and rebounds nearly the same as always. Courtesy of David Dow/NBA
During a late June workout, Duncan Robinson was focused on the speed of his shot release.
As a veteran NBA sharpshooter, the ability to get his jumper off quickly is vital for Robinson. Before he could stop this particular workout, he had to make three consecutive corner three-pointers without holding the ball for more than 0.4 seconds on any one shot. But how to track that sort of thing?
The answer lay inside the Spalding TF DNA ball Robinson was using. Produced by a company called Sport IQ, the ball contains a 'smart valve,' a replacement for a traditional inflation valve that's outfitted with tracking technology. The sensor captures everything from simple makes and misses to metrics like the arc of each shot, the spin rate of the ball, and—vitally for Robinson—release time.
Robinson tells me he's been using versions of SIQ connected balls for around five years, the bulk of his NBA career. 'I haven't come across anything quite like it,' he says.
And before long, the same tracking technology Robinson uses in workouts could make its way inside every NBA game ball.
Largely unbeknownst to players on the court during 2025 NBA Summer League play in mid-July in Las Vegas, roughly half their games were played using a ball outfitted with a modified version of SIQ's smart valve. The ball was engineered by league partner Wilson into its regulation NBA ball. If these test runs in Vegas prove successful, the NBA will have a new data-gathering tool at its disposal to both improve and speed up certain officiating decisions. Down the line, the adoption of the tech could potentially lead to big leaps in other areas like fan engagement, stat tracking, and analytics, thanks to the system's ability to precisely track the basketball during play.
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.
'People said there were sensors in the ball when there weren't, and people said that there were not sensors in the ball when there were,' says Dayveon Ross, cofounder and CEO of ShotTracker, another vendor the NBA tested in 2019. ShotTracker's product, which includes both ball sensors and other features, has been used extensively at the college level, including across the Big 12 conference in recent years. 'So it was kinda 50-50, which is exactly what you want.'
But those 2019 tests did not ultimately result in any permanent NBA adoption of a connected ball. The issue of the ball's feel was part of that; so, too, was the league's desire to invest more of its resources at the time into computer vision programs, which could glean much of the same location data as a connected ball without the physical hassle.
'It got to a point where we said, the design's just not there,' Tom Ryan, senior VP of basketball strategy and growth at the NBA, told me during a sit-down interview in Las Vegas. 'These sensors are too big, they're too noticeable. So we kinda said, pencils down on this approach for now, until it gets significantly smaller. And that's where we are now.'
Enter SIQ and a new approach: replacing the existing ball valve with its 'smart valve' technology. The tech purports to solve both the NBA's prior issues. As essentially a valve replacement, it creates no additional dead spot in the ball. Plus, it only adds a negligible amount of weight, per CEO Erik Anderson.
'On an approximately 600-gram basketball, we add less than 1 gram of weight,' Anderson says. Courtesy of Logan Riely/NBA
The NBA is also simplifying its requirements this time around. Rather than attempting to track both location-based data and touch data, as it did in 2019, the league is simply interested in the latter for these 2025 tests. During Anderson's presentation to team staffers and various assembled media at the NBA's yearly Launchpad event in Vegas on July 14, he showed a side-by-side video. On one side, players were shown dribbling and shooting an SIQ connected ball. On the other side, we saw SIQ's internal system display a green light whenever the ball was in free flight and a red light whenever it was being touched by a player, the floor, or the hoop. The setup can be slowed down to isolate each frame of the video, allowing any viewer to determine if the ball is actively being touched during any captured frame.
The league hopes this data will soon be helpful for various 'last touch' officiating decisions like out of bounds, goaltending, or basket interference calls. While SIQ's sensor can't detect the identity of the player touching the ball, the eventual goal is to pair this system with the NBA's existing Hawk-Eye optical tracking data.
'You synchronize the time stamp of the ball sensor technology with the time stamp of the video solution, by millisecond,' Schmidt explains. 'So in the end you can synchronize the video frame with the data feed, and you look at the data of which player had what limb closest to the ball, to identify who could have touched it.'
I've recently had a chance to demo the same SIQ tech Robinson used in his workout, which uses the same smart valve but is a bit different from the NBA ball. (SIQ provided me with this ball so I could test it out.) It's produced by Spalding, for starters, as opposed to Wilson; the league switched its official ball vendor from Spalding to Wilson starting in the 2021-22 season. Plus, the ball I handled tracks those additional metrics like make/miss, spin rate, and other data points the NBA currently isn't utilizing.
With the caveat that I'm a miserable basketball player, I can report that the consumer ball feels no different than any other I've played with. I forgot it had a sensor in it at times—until I checked my phone and saw my godawful stats on SIQ's connected app.
My opinion hardly matters compared to a pro like Robinson's, but as it happens, he agrees.
'The integration is impressively seamless,' Robinson says. 'It feels like a regular basketball. There's no weight discrepancy or anything that really feels abnormal. That's part of the magic, you feel like you're playing with a regular ball—and then all of a sudden you connect it to your phone and you're getting this live-time feedback.'
But will enough of Robinson's NBA peers agree? Testing in the Paint
The NBA Players Association is arguably the most powerful player's union in North American pro sports. Its members are also, shall we say, quite particular.
'There's no other league that I'm aware of where the perception and the approval of the players is as important for something like that as in the NBA,' Schmidt says.
In other words, the ball had better feel truly identical, or these guys are going to notice. And if the players aren't in, getting a connected ball approved for official play via collective bargaining is all but impossible.
Schmidt's company, Kinexon, has recent experience with this player approval process in another major sport. Alongside Adidas, the company was centrally involved in creating a connected soccer ball used for offside and other officiating decisions starting with the 2022 FIFA World Cup. That testing process included months of blind trials across several major European soccer leagues, plus a variety of mechanical and ground truth tests.
The NBA is taking a similar approach here. Per multiple sources, initial tests of the SIQ Wilson ball at the G League Winter Showcase in December 2024 were largely mechanical in nature. Officials confirmed ball connectivity, ensured there was no significant data loss, optimized the sensors, and that sort of thing.
Summer League was the first instance of blind player testing. Sources tell me that roughly half the games played in Vegas between July 10 and 20 utilized the SIQ ball, which was connected to and tracked by sensors set up around both arenas on the UNLV campus. Players were surveyed after each game, both on ball-related topics and unrelated ones (to maintain the blindness of the trial by avoiding any obvious tip-offs). Sources say the NBA prioritized tests in games featuring players who have spent time in the NBA in the past, plus for guards and others who tend to handle the ball most often.
'The testing now is going much smoother [than in 2019],' Ryan says.
Test results provided to WIRED by the NBA back up that assertion. SIQ's connected balls were tested in 58 Summer League games, with roughly 550 postgame player surveys conducted. The NBA received zero comments about ball changes or playability issues on any of these surveys.
For his part, Robinson also doesn't think the change should cause any playability issues.
'I don't foresee that being an issue,' he says. 'I'm somebody who's pretty particular about the ball that I shoot and the feel that it has and all that sort of stuff. I was actually on record as noting a material difference when we shifted from Spalding to Wilson [in 2021], as a lot of players were.'
More testing is needed, including in settings where more veteran NBA players can get their hands on the SIQ ball. Ryan tells me the league would love to collect at least a full season of data while using the ball in the G League (essentially the minor leagues for the NBA), another common testing ground for possible future NBA tech.
A connected basketball is likely coming to the NBA sooner rather than later. And while officiating is the current focus, it's easy to envision other uses in areas like stats collection, broadcast graphics, and fan engagement.
'Do they want to do it from a rule basis, where it's who touched the ball last,' Robinson muses. 'Or do they maybe want to take more of a marketing approach and say, 'Oh, that last 3 by Steph Curry, he released it in 0.3 seconds and his arc was this.''
If SIQ's ball can survive the rigors of NBA player testing—and as long as details like player data usage and rights can be worked out in agreement with the player's union—don't be surprised if that sort of data is showing up in broadcasts fairly quickly.
'I hope that we get there soon,' Schmidt says. 'The only thing we need is the approval from the players.'