NBA to Host Some All-Star Weekend Events on LED Glass Courts

This will be the NBA’s first glass court game.

The league announced on Monday that a portion of All-Star weekend in Indianapolis, including the complete schedule of All-Star Saturday Night, would take place on a cutting-edge, fully video LED court that will be built at Lucas Oil Stadium.

This implies that on February 17, in addition to the celebrity game on February 16, the skills competition, 3-point contest, slam dunk competition, and shooting battle between Stephen Curry and Sabrina Ionescu will all take place on the glass court.

On February 18, the All-Star Game itself will still take place on a wooden court.

According to Carlton Myers, an NBA senior vice president in charge of live production and entertainment, “it gives us a little bit more range in what we can do as far as interactive graphics, reactionary graphics that happen on the floor, changing the floor design, changing the colors, really reacting to the play that happens on the court.”

“Therefore, we are really satisfied with the possibilities that this offers us. And we anticipate that it will have a significant effect both inside the building and while viewing on television.

The German business ASB GlassFloor created the court, which has been used in competitions by the sport’s governing organization, FIBA. In 2022, the use of LED glass flooring for elite tournaments was permitted by FIBA. The league just disclosed that the court is more costly than a wood surface, without going into more detail.

For a while now, the NBA has been thinking about applications for the product. Last week, Joe Dumars, the NBA’s executive vice president for basketball operations, and Andre Iguodala of the National Basketball Players Association conducted experiments on the court to see how it functions and if it’s safe.

According to the NBA, the court is really made up of two layers of five millimeter-thick laminated safety glass. The LED panels will provide all of the designs on the opaque surface. Every tournament will have a unique appearance for the courts, with real-time game statistics, replays, video clips, and even player tracking animations among the features that are shown.

In terms of bounce and feel, the surface plays almost just as wood does.

How does it seem to you? Is it gaining traction? Has it given? When you hear about this court, they are the first questions that come to mind, according to Dumars. “And they received satisfactory responses.”

When it employed distinct-looking surfaces for the In-Season Tournament earlier this season, the NBA experimented with changing the layout of the courts. Those courts were painted a new color, but the timber was remained the same.