NBA using ASB GlassFloor's LED glass court during All-Star weekend

The entire All-Star Saturday lineup will be played on a glass LED video-display basketball court.

The NBA is dressing up this year’s All-Star Weekend exhibitions in Indianapolis with a glass LED video-display basketball court courtesy of ASB GlassFloor, the German court-maker that supplied the same surface for last summer’s FIBA U19 Women’s World Cup.

ASB’s LumiFlex court, which streams video in HD 4K, will be used to augment the NBA’s annual celebrity game on Friday, Feb. 16 and All-Star Saturday’s lineup of the skills challenge, 3-point contest, Steph Curry vs. Sabrina Ionescu 3-point challenge and dunk contest. The floor will display dynamic graphics after key moments, court design/color changes, real-time stats, and location-based player tracking animations and interactive games, which will be enabled by a system combining the LumiFlex’s tracking capabilities and Kinexon wearables.

“We’ve designed it in a way that’s very specific to each one of the competitions,” said Carlton Myers, the NBA’s SVP & Head of Live Event Production. “Things you would normally see on the Jumbotron will now appear on the floor alongside the live action.”

Buzz around the U19 Women’s World Cup use case piqued the league’s interest for a collaboration with ASB. The NBA, which is proud of the embellished wood court designs it rolled out for its inaugural In-Season Tournament, has fielded inquiries about using LED courts for several years, but the integrity of the playing surface had previously been an impediment.

However, upon rigorous testing both at the league office and an Indianapolis warehouse in the weeks leading up to the All-Star festivities, Christopher Arena, the NBA’s SVP & Head of On-Court and Brand Partnerships, said they found LumiFlex’s surface to be “exact, if not extremely similar” in its properties to traditional maple – although he acknowledged the cost of implementation was higher.

Because the NBA’s court specifications differ from ASB’s typical clients (about two feet longer and one foot wider than FIBA guidelines), this activation required a custom build. The LumiFlex is comprised of large glass panels, embedded with ceramic dots to ensure grip, and underpinned by an intricate suspension system. Setup at the warehouse for testing took six days; Myers said he expects the install at Lucas Oil Stadium, which will host the Friday and Saturday events ahead of the All-Star Game itself at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Sunday, to take two.

Christof Babinsky, ASB’s managing director and majority owner, told SBJ his company has seen a marked uptick in interest since FIBA changed its competition regulations to authorize LED glass as a playing surface in 2022. September's furnishing of the Bundesliga season opener with a LumiFlex is one example. This is only ASB’s second deployment in the United States, adding to a one-off Nike event more than five years ago, but the company plans to open a U.S. office within the year and begin manufacturing stateside in the next couple of years.

“Our organization is moving to a much bigger basketball focus than it was before,” Babinsky said. “We’ve seen a drastic increase in demand.”

The commercial appeal of the court centers on its flexibility: Babinsky estimated the LumiFlex can add 11 new pieces of advertising inventory across a basketball game because of its ability to shape-shift. While the All-Star activation is for exhibition events, Myers added the court was “well-received” by event sponsors like Ruffles (celebrity game) and Starry (3-point contest), who the league kept abreast of design concepts during development.

“If you think about All-Star Saturday night with a regular floor, [event sponsors] have just gotten a decal here or there that was specific to their event,” Myers said. “Now we’re able to use their colors for the entire floor design, we’re able to put their logos in places that they weren’t before, because we have rules against decals being in gameplay… So actually you’re going to get a lot more broadcast visibility to their marks.”

The NBA also kept its broadcast partners – ESPN for the celebrity game, TNT for the Saturday night slate – in the loop, including a demo of the court. Myers compared the floor’s intended impact on viewers to that of in-arena audio effects playing after a made basket, adding that ESPN and TNT “are in lockstep with [the NBA’s] approach, where we’re only going to enhance moments that happen on the court and not constantly do things that would distract you from the play.”

Babinsky is high on the court’s potential from a competitive perspective as well, noting the surface’s carefully engineered elasticity delivers friction more evenly than hardwood – and thus presents less risk of injury to players: “On a wood floor, the athletes’ shoe decreases in speed initially in a fairly equal way, but then towards the end, very abruptly. That doesn’t happen on the glass floor. That’s one of the main reasons why it puts a lot less strain on muscles and ligaments.”

NBA use cases beyond isolated exhibitions will rely on install and teardown times decreasing because so many of its teams play in multi-purpose venues that require quick turnover for other sports or concerts (Babinsky said the NBA installations were drawn out of an abundance of caution, and that he believes in the future ASB will be able to install video floors within eight hours). But the potential is immense.

“If it’s an event – an In-Season Tournament, a game played overseas, a neutral site type of thing – where we can control the beginning and the end, that’s probably more viable,” Arena said. “There also is a fixed version of this (court), and so it’s possible that maybe it’s a practice facility thing that a team finds beneficial. There’s other ways. But a lot of our teams practice in multipurpose facilities. So it’s like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – if you know the book, that’s sort of how this plays out.”

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