LOS ANGELES -- What people like and dislike about the NBA varies depending on whom you ask, with one exception: Everybody hates the referees.
Most people still think referees are incompetent, biased against their team, or worse, crooked. Obviously, after spending untold dollars and hours to investigate and repair what went wrong in the Tim Donaghy scandal, the NBA can't win that one. Old opinions die hard.
But the powers that be in the league believe they have found a way to win that argument, one incremental vote at a time. For several years now, the NBA's competition committee -- and in turn, its owners -- have approved one advance after another into the bold, techno-driven world of instant replay. Commissioner David Stern is on record saying that he wants more aggressive use of replay, and members of the competition committee are convinced that he won't rest until the NBA has an all-out challenge system similar to that employed by the NFL.
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| If replay eventually includes a provision for challenges, the system will need a narrow focus. (Getty Images) |
The vote was prompted, in large part, by Michael Finley's game-winning 3-pointer against Sacramento in the final week of the regular season -- a shot that shouldn't have counted because it came after the 24-second clock had expired. Under the current rules -- the rules that will be in effect for the NBA Finals between the Lakers and Magic -- such a play is not reviewable. The Spurs' win helped them hold off the Rockets for the No. 3 seed in the West, thus securing home-court advantage in the first round against Dallas. So this was the next logical step. Once referees were given the latitude to use replay to determine whether a shot beat the buzzer at the end of a quarter or whether it was a 2- or 3-pointer, it only made sense that they'd be able to use replay to make sure shots after the 24-second buzzer weren't erroneously counted -- or vice versa.
That's all well and good. The NBA, like the NFL, is using technology and (thus far) minimal interruptions in game action to do what the vast majority of fans want: Make sure the rulings of the officials are as accurate as possible. But the speed at which the NBA is sliding down the slippery slope of replay is alarming. Let's leave Bill Belichick and his red hanky in the NFL where they belong, shall we?
"It seems the direction the league is going is toward a challenge system," one team executive on the competition committee said. "That seems to be what they're pushing, and I'm in favor of it. Even those of us who were initially opposed to instant replay now believe that, once you have it, you might as well go all the way."
It's a sensible argument. In other words, why use technology to get some calls right, but not others? But you have to admit, the idea of Phil Jackson, Mike Brown, Stan Van Gundy or, heaven forbid, Doc Rivers wielding a challenge handkerchief is upsetting. Hey, nothing against Doc, but as far as he's concerned, Kendrick Perkins has never committed a personal foul in his life. He'll throw that damn hanky every trip down the floor.
Plus, how long will it take before Rasheed Wallace picks up a hanky and throws it right back in the opposing coach's face -- along with an expletive or three? (OK, so it's decided then. No hankies until 'Sheed retires. Yellow cards? A button to press, like on Jeopardy?)
At the crux of it, I don't know what's worse. Game 7 of the Finals being decided on a disputed call that easily could've been corrected by looking at a replay? Or Game 7 of the Finals taking 4½ hours because coaches were challenging defensive three-second calls in the second quarter?
The slope isn't quite that slippery, of course. But league executives don't have all the answers yet and are justifiably uncertain exactly where this is going. And if they're looking to achieve that elusive state of "transparency," there's a reason it's so elusive. If the league wants a world where everybody agrees that NBA games are officiated perfectly, that world doesn't exist. Coaches and players are born and bred to gripe about calls. Instant replay decisions will only give them more decisions to complain about. And the conspiracy theorists will still be there to insist that Steve Javie or Dick Bavetta or Bennett Salvatore were just as blind or biased when looking at the replay as they were when they saw the play live.
Thus, there would be little support among the league's GMs for anything other than a narrowly focused challenge system. Timeouts would be forfeited for failed challenges, as in the NFL. Issues such as whether the ball hit the rim before the shot clock expired, or whether a player touched the ball when it was in the cylinder, would be eligible for a challenge. Whether Nene had just committed felonious assault on a screen-and-roll would not.
On one hand, you have to admire the NBA's efforts to get the game right. The league was stung badly by the Donaghy scandal, which only breathed life into conspiracy theorists who've been screaming about biased or flat-out poor officiating for years. It hasn't gone unnoticed at the league office that one of the NBA's most thrilling and highly rated playoffs in years has generated as much buzz about the officiating as about the games themselves.
This is why a significant portion of the competition committee meeting in Chicago was devoted to a discussion of another hot-button issue: the current flagrant foul crisis that has plagued this postseason. The impact of a miscalled flagrant isn't as obvious as, say, a game-winning shot that was erroneously ruled to have beaten the 24-second clock, but it's nonetheless another problem that concerns team executives.
Given the volume of flagrant fouls that have either been rescinded or upgraded on review by the league office, clearly the league has a problem. On one controversial play in particular -- Rajon Rondo's foul on Brad Miller in the Boston-Chicago series -- the committee was split on whether that should've been ruled a flagrant. It was called a personal foul on the court, and the league office didn't upgrade it to a flagrant the next day after reviewing the video and considering all the circumstances.
As a result, at some point before next season, the NBA will be issuing a clarification to referees, teams, and the public as to what constitutes a flagrant-two, flagrant-one and garden-variety personal foul. It isn't changing the rulebook, but rather putting in writing all the factors that the league considers when decided whether a foul was just a foul, or more than that.
"The committee seemed satisfied in reviewing the video of numerous flagrant fouls with the decisions we've made," said Joel Litvin, the NBA's president of league and basketball operations. "There was extensive discussion about the Rondo-Miller foul, and the committee was split on whether it was flagrant or not. And to us, that reflects the fact that these are judgment calls, ultimately, and sometimes judgment calls are real tough and that was an example.
"Over the summer," Litvin added, "we're going to consider whether we can add further clarification for the benefit of our teams, players and fans."
Re-examining flagrant fouls. Determining how far is too far to go with replay. It's all part of the NBA's efforts to make the hardest game in the world to officiate as perfect as humanly possible. The league has moved thoughtfully and deliberately so far, testing each new replay threshold before forging ahead to the next frontier. But the closer you get to the finished product, the harder the decisions become.
"We want to have a set of rules, we want to call it the way they're written, we want to have a game called the same no matter who's reffing it, and we want to assure that we get it right," Stern, who was to address the media before Game 1 of the Finals on Thursday night, said earlier in the playoffs. "Against that, we struggle with the problem of how to get it perfectly right. Put 16 cameras and take four hours to play the game? We can't do that and we won't do that. So what you're seeing is us move slowly to more replay. And I think this is a good time to look at it again. And it may happen and it may not happen."
All I'm saying is this: Be careful. Think long and hard before you start passing out the hankies. At some point, the pursuit of perfection only makes the imperfections stand out even more.
