SECAUCUS, N.J. -- “I love this,” said Joe Borgia, the NBA’s senior vice president of replay and referee operations.

Borgia and his team devised a true-false quiz on the NBA rulebook for a group of journalists and we were bricking question after question. A few minutes later, the video portion of the test wasn’t much easier. I denied Kendall Marshall continuation when he was fouled on a drive to the hole, and it wasn’t until Borgia’s aide replayed the reel frame by frame that I saw my error. On first watch, I swore Marshall gathered the ball, planted a foot, then took two additional steps before going up. But in slo-mo, Marshall took only the two permitted steps after cupping the ball against his torso -- totally kosher. I was dead wrong.

Even as Borgia dinged us, the exercise was all good times, but the underlying message was obvious: Officiating professional basketball is inordinately difficult for mortal beings. On Tuesday night when the 2014-15 season opens, those mortal beings will have a little more help from the shiny, new NBA Replay Center at NBA Entertainment’s headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey.

That means when you see game officials at an NBA arena this season gather in front of the monitor at the scorer's table after a play triggers a video review (there are now 15 instances when that happens), those officials will be looking at clips, images and angles that are curated at the replay center by an individual who is not only well-versed in the arcana of the rulebook, but who has no other priority for three hours than to monitor the game in question from nine different camera angles. Standing behind that person, quite literally, will be a senior NBA honcho -- for example, Borgia, Rod Thorn (president of basketball operations) or Kiki VanDeWeghe (senior vice president of basketball operations).

“Here was the issue that we wanted to solve,” Steve Hellmuth, the executive vice president of operations and technology, said. “The referees would huddle, come over to courtside. By the time they got there, frequently the broadcasters and the production guys had already shown the answer maybe three or four times. Then [the officials] are looking at the video and our referees are looked upon as slowing things down. It’s, ‘Why don’t they know. I already know.’ Well, now during that time interval, we’re going to be working with the video.”

In past years, NBA officials relied on broadcast producers to provide video of a play. If a ref at the scorer’s table wanted a baseline angle or the precise moment a point guard gathers the ball during an off-ball foul call, he’d have to ask for it. The producer in the truck could have an Emmy to his name, but he might not know what a “gather” is and probably wouldn’t ace Borgia’s rulebook quiz either.

Borgia recalled the simulation the league performed during the five games of the NBA Finals. Game 1 in San Antonio had been rough, and before Game 2, he asked the producer for a few new angles, including the overhead camera. Borgia’s request was granted quite literally -- the replay team had the blimp shot for Game 2.

When basketball officiating lifers communicate with even the most talented live game producers on the planet, a lot can get lost in translation. But an officiating lifer like Borgia, his charges at the individual game consoles and the refs on the ground share a common vocabulary.

“We speak the same language,” Borgia said. “We don’t have that issue. When [game officials] come on, we sort of know what they want, whereas a producer, as great as they may be, ‘OK. Clear path? What the hell is a clear path?’ They don’t know the criteria. We’ve got it set up. We’ve had some [preseason situations] as short as seven seconds of video.”

The change in process and personnel will undoubtedly speed up the replay process, which is crucial for a league that sees flow as one of its greatest edges over sports such as football and baseball. The way Borgia, Thorn and Hellmuth explained it, the replay center -- decked out with nearly 100 monitors, 14 very cool individual game consoles each featuring nine camera angles, six more behind those, the presence of wise men with decades of collective NBA experience -- will tee up crystal-clear evidence that will make the call abundantly obvious. It’s almost as if the replay center is making the call ... except that it’s not, which the NBA is very intent to emphasize.

In the view of the league’s top basketball operations people, officiating is an experiential task that must be performed on the court of play. A guy sitting in Secaucus can’t hear a power forward tell his defender, “Do that again next time down and I’ll beat your ass,” and he can’t get a clear decibel reading of the intensity of the game. Technology is an aid, but it’s not a substitution.

“From our standpoint, we don’t want to take it away from a referee right now,” Thorn said from the replay room Thursday.

But if Secaucus has already watched the sequence one frame at a time from three optimal camera angles and is certain of a call before a game official has picked up the monitor, why not just furnish him with the call? If the goal is to (a) get the call right and (b) make that call as quickly as possible, isn’t the most efficient route to say into the game official’s ear, “Chicago ball”?

“Two years from now, that may be,” Thorn said. “Down the road, yes. Right now, we want to make sure we get this thing right and god knows what the glitches may be. So far everything has been fine but we’re not in the regular season and I’m sure some things will come up that we’re going to have to deal with. Our feeling was that we’ll leave the ultimate decision in the hands of the on-court crew chief with his guys for right now. But there may come a day when you have a chip in your ear, you’re running down the floor, you wave your hand about a 3-point shot and Joe Borgia says, ‘His foot was on the line. It was a 2,’ so you don’t even have to go over to the table.”

We have been on that incremental path for some time now. Though this is the first season of the command center, replay is now 12 years old. There will be a day in the future when thermodynamics might be the best way to determine contact on a foul call or motion sensors can detect traveling. The game will always look different -- and from the vantage point of a console in New Jersey, toggling between nine angles, frame by frame over Eric Bledsoe’s crossover from Wednesday night’s Phoenix-Clippers game, it looked mesmerizing. If the NBA’s investment in technology pays off, it also will look more fair than ever.