What’s new in NBA technology for the 2026-27 season

The 2026-27 season tipped off on Oct. 20 with a new layer of NBA technology between fans and the court. The NBA App now has an AI assistant that answers basketball questions and a live feed called Game Pulse. Tracking data feeds two new stats on dribbling and zone defense. Peacock streams full games in a vertical frame for phones, and the league tested a sensor-equipped ball in preseason. This is also the second year of the league’s 11-year deals with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon, so the viewing map has settled into place.

Year two of the NBA’s media partners

National games now sit with three companies. According to the NBA’s viewing guide, ABC and ESPN carry 80 regular-season games, NBC and Peacock carry 100, and Prime Video carries 66. Each partner streams its games in its own app: ESPN’s app for ABC and ESPN, Peacock for NBC, and Prime Video for Amazon. League Pass still handles out-of-market games through NBA.com and the NBA App.

The weekly rhythm is set. Peacock streams up to two games on Mondays through April 5, NBC and Peacock have Tuesday doubleheaders, ESPN owns Wednesdays, and Prime Video picks up Thursdays in January. Prime Video also holds the knockout rounds of the Emirates NBA Cup, all six Play-In Tournament games and the Eastern Conference Finals. The league said the 2025-26 regular season reached 170 million viewers across its partners, its most in 24 years. For the money and strategy behind these deals, see our breakdown of sports media rights in 2026.

Game Pulse and Ask NBA bring AI into the NBA App

The biggest app change is a feature called Game Pulse. The league’s 2026-27 digital announcement describes it as one stream of live court visualization, highlights, milestones and advanced stats such as shot charts and quarter-by-quarter player lines. Game Pulse also flags momentum swings and standout performances as they happen. Former players Muggsy Bogues, Carlos Boozer, Gary Payton and Joakim Noah will add commentary during the season, along with creators including Lethal Shooter and Kris London.

Ask NBA is the new AI assistant. You type a question about a game, a player or a trend, and it answers from official NBA data, including the new in-game advanced stats. A separate tool, NBA Blueprint, uses AI to write pregame and postgame reports for every game. The app also adds AI-assisted navigation for scores, schedules and standings, plus daily live coverage of warm-ups before tip-off.

New NBA tracking stats: Handle Score and zone defense

The stats behind those features come from NBA Inside the Game, a platform the league built with Amazon Web Services. When the partnership launched last season, the NBA said the system processes player tracking data covering 29 data points for each player. That data powered three stats in 2025-26: Defensive Box Score, Shot Difficulty with an expected field goal percentage, and Gravity, which measures how much defensive attention a player pulls. Gravity draws on optical tracking captured 60 times per second.

Two new measures arrive this season:

• Handle Score grades the style and effectiveness of each dribble move.
• A zone defense model shows how often teams play zone and how well it works for them.

Ask NBA draws on the league’s new in-game advanced stats, so a question about a guard’s dribble moves or a team’s zone habits can return a number during the game. We explain where body tracking goes from here in our feature on the next era of player tracking.

League Pass upgrades and Tap to Watch

With games spread across three national partners, local networks and League Pass, the league leans on Tap to Watch, a tool returning from last season that links a post or search result to the right live telecast, whether national, local, international or League Pass. This season the links appear on every TikTok post that mentions #NBA and on content from hundreds of creators with access to NBA highlights. Google shows them in search results and on its new Sportscaster platform. On X, a new NBA Gametime timeline combines where-to-watch info with scores and highlights.

League Pass gets three viewing updates:

• Auto-Play Next suggests another matchup when your game ends.
• Multiview Focus Mode makes one game the main window while up to three others play beside it.
• A personalized Multiview card builds a four-game grid from the teams you follow.

Vertical NBA games on Peacock

NBC is reshaping the picture itself for phones. Peacock’s Courtside Live feature, introduced at the 2026 All-Star Game, lets you switch among camera angles beside the main feed. In April, Peacock added a live vertical stream in which AI follows the action and crops the NBC Sports broadcast to a 9:16 frame. Peacock called it the first time an entertainment app offered full live broadcasts in that format. The company said that since it added vertical clips in early 2025, mobile users watch more often, and 20% of Winter Olympics viewers tapped from a highlight into the live event.

In-arena NBA technology: smart balls and Wi-Fi 7

Some of the season’s tech never reaches your screen. In select preseason games, the league tested a Wilson basketball with a Bluetooth sensor inside, collecting data for possible use in future officiating. Officials in those games also wore wrist devices to talk with the replay center during reviews, scoring changes and clock problems, after a Summer League pilot. The Associated Press reported that neither tool will carry into the regular season, and the ball data did not affect any calls.

Arenas are upgrading their networks too. In Atlanta, State Farm Arena is rolling out Cisco Wi-Fi 7, one of a handful of venues worldwide with the standard, and the Hawks are opening a year-round production command center for games and concerts. For how venue networks shape what you can do from your seat, read our look at the connected stadium on game day.