I love basketball. I spend an obscene amount of time following the NBA for someone living in the worst possible NBA time zone, and I will almost certainly return to playing despite the fact that a basketball injury has significantly lowered my quality of life for the last year. I just love it that much.

One of my biggest frustrations is with the way travels are called in the NBA and the constant conversation around it. Yes, NBA referees let offensive players get away with too much leeway and it is ruining the game. But the number of people who flat out don’t understand the way travelling works is infuriating.

The rules are simple – at every level of the game, players are allowed to take two steps after “ending” (NCAA) or “completing” (NBA and FIBA) their dribble. The problem is defining when the dribble ends. Players at all levels have gotten increasingly creative with taking as many deceptive steps as possible while the ball is in the air and the dribble is still in progress. For example, popular videos like the one below claim that this is a travel. However Harden’s hand is clearly still above the halfway point of the ball at the 0:05 mark in this video so his dribble hasn’t ended. He could drive to the rim from here with a totally live dribble. The dribble only comes to an end when he places two hands on the ball, and annoyingly he is an expert at timing this a fraction of a second after he plants his right foot. From here he takes two legal steps, a left and a right before shooting.

The issue is not, and has never been, the travel rule or the gather step. The issue is more clearly defining and enforcing carrying violations. Today the NBA lets some players get away with moving their hand under the ball on almost every play. This has the obvious problem of making it almost impossible to defend one on one, but more importantly it blurs the line as to when a dribble has ended. If placing a hand under the ball could just be part of a push-cross then the refs can’t claim that it’s also the gather step, and so you get scenarios where fans are crying for a travel when they should be begging for a carry call.

This feels very addressable with AI similar to the line cameras in tennis. It would take very little training data to teach a model when a hand is too far underneath the ball or when it has otherwise stopped moving downwards, and a buzzer could sound any time the cameras detect a carry. This would be annoying for about a month before the players adjusted, and then the game would be infinitely more fun to watch.