Depth Perception

[ianonavy]

We have decided on a robot design that requires sensing how far the basketball hoops are from our robot, but we are not sure how to go about doing that. We were thinking about mounting the Kinect on our robot, but that proved to be a lot more complicated than we expected. I've read some posts here about using lasers to detect how far the hoops are. How would our team go about doing that? What is the simplest/easiest way of going about doing this?

tl;dr; What's the easiest way to sense how far away the basketball hoops are from the robot?

Thanks for your input, good luck on your build season!