The anti-nuclear bunker 15 meters underground where the NBA keeps the most precious secrets in its 75-year history

the NBA He is having a very special season. The best basketball league in the world celebrates 75 years of a history filled with famous moments and stars that have forever marked global sport. names like Michael Jordan, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird or more recent Kobe Bryant or LeBron James They made the American competition one of the most important in the world.

Today, while a new campaign is being developed, the organization that has Adam Silver As commissioner he has prepared various events to celebrate the special anniversary. But if there’s something the NBA is so protective of as treasure, it’s its archive with photographs of its entire history. In a bunker located a little more than 15 meters below the surface of the earth, even protected from nuclear attacks, about 80 kilometers from New York, it is one of the places with one of the largest audiovisual content in world sports.

The compound is located in Secaucus, New Jersey. It was built in the sixties By technology brand AT&T It is now controlled by a data protection and disaster recovery company called Vital Records Company. His name is VRI, specializing in having hundreds of underground locations in North America that store millions of tape cartridges in an intensely controlled and monitored environment.

Through an article he published The Wall Street Journal, It was known that the great workbook owned by the National Basketball Association with pictures of its history The memory capacity is about 39.000.000 GB of data. This number – about 37 petabytes-, It is nearly twice the size of the digital collection of the United States Library of Congress. A piece of data to measure how many hours and hours of recordings there are in the cache of the most important basketball league on the planet.

It should be noted that this volume is increasing day by day, especially in recent years with the technological innovations created by the league in broadcasting its matches. Each game is recorded in HD with 12 camera shots adding up to a gigabyte count.

“We have all the great moments right at our fingertips,” said Paul Hersheimer, senior vice president of content production for the league, the US underground newspaper for the NBA Archives that has its own management system.

everyone The information generated in matches is automatically encoded using indexed stats, play by play. “With a click or two, you’re literally looking at the video,” said Chris Halton, the NBA’s senior vice president of technology and media operations. At the same time, the memo highlights how easy and accessible images were when the league began using the material to celebrate its 75th anniversary this season.

The media was also able to verify, within the security measures that the vault has No cell phone signal. Something to highlight Ribbon cartridges do not have identification tag, such as “Game 6 of the 1998 Finals between Chicago and Utah,” where the jump Jordan remembers occurred, earning the Bulls the sixth episode in their history.

The company responsible for the file owns Small list of contacts who are authorized to access the group and they refer to the NBA only by the customer’s official account number. League-supporting content is available at any time of the day, and for routine maintenance purposes, the Company has an appointment for pick-up from the League’s offices every two weeks.

But next to this pool in New Jersey, The company has league materials transcribed elsewhere, which very few league executives have accessed. The remaining facility has an area of ​​approximately 12,000 square meters covered in two underground floors and is located one hour from the main archive.

It is hidden at the top of a secluded road that runs along the side of a mountain and one recent morning it was shrouded in fog. “People would have no idea this was here,” Brian Cassidy, VRI account manager, commented on anonymity in space.

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