The play, in real time to the naked eye, might have looked very close to a violation. LeBron James leaped, got his right hand on the ball with a few tenths of the game’s final second remaining and tapped it through the basket to give the Los Angeles Lakers a buzzer-beating win last season.

Referees on the floor called it correctly. Video replay backed up their call, and the Lakers got a victory over the Indiana Pacers.

Turns out, it wasn’t close at all.

The NBA has a relatively new tool called “automated officiating,” and the robotic eyes that are now tracking just about everything on basketball courts showed that James was nowhere near committing offensive basket interference on that play. It wasn’t needed to decide matters in that case — again, the humans got it right — but th

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