nba officiating

I thoroughly enjoy watching the NBA, especially the playoffs. Tonight's game four between the Cavs and Magic should be a great game; if the Cavs don't get a win tonight, it may be all over in the Eastern Finals. However, over the past few years, the NBA playoffs have often been overshadowed by what I consider the biggest problem facing the game today: extremely inconsistent and poor officiating.

Over the past decade or so, the officiating crews have slowly become very lax with calling traveling, and very stringent calling touch fouls. This combination has caused the players to evolve and often fundamentally change the way they play the game. In today's game, a slashing guard who can take a defender off the dribble, get to the basket, cause some contact near the rim, and hope for either a made basket, a quick put back for a big man because his defender was forced to help, or most often, to get a foul call is the most prized player a team could have. This style of play has made players Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James superstars. And these players are doing exactly what they should be doing. They have strong incentive to play with abandon and hope for a foul call because officials consistently call the game that way. This type of officiating, however, is doing a disservice to the game in my opinion.

Throughout the past few playoff seasons officiating has been incredibly inconsistent and at times even corrupt (read Tim Donaghy). I think the problems really started coming to light during the '06 Finals between the Mavericks and Heat. Anyone who watched that series remembers it as the finals that Dwane Wade shot 4,324 free throws. Now I don't blame Wade for continually driving to the basket to get fouls, he was just trying to win and that was the easiest way to do it. But I also firmly believe that the Mavericks were the best team in the league that year, and the officials going foul crazy cost them the championship.

And calling touch fouls near the basket isn't the only problem with the officiating. How officials distinguish personal fouls, flagrant ones and flagrant twos is unbelievably inconsistent. For example, Ron Artest was given a flagrant two for a hard foul on Pau Gasol at the end game 5 of this year's western conference semifinals. The foul was nothing more than a strong attempt to defend the basket. It was obviously a foul, but in the NBA you should be allowed to aggressively defend your basket when you can put your body between it and the offensive player. Instead Artest was ejected. Contrast that with Dwight Howard throwing a deliberate elbow at Samuel Dalembert in game five the Orlando-Philly series in round one. Called a flagrant one on the court, Howard was not ejected and helped lead the magic to a come from behind victory that gave them a commanding 3-2 series lead. Although is was later upgraded to a flagrant two, the damage was done and the sixers lost their chance to steal a game in Orlando and force the Magic to have to be the team that needed to win two in a row. These types of inconsistencies need to be corrected. Not to mention the arbitrary seven flagrants in the course of the playoffs equal a suspension rule. When officials are giving out flagrants like candy, the league is just asking for one of their big stars (perhaps this year it could be Howard or Kobe Bryant) to be forced to miss a game during the finals. Does the league really want one of its biggest stars to be absent during the league's biggest stage?

Now officials are always going to miss some calls. Basketball is definitely the most difficult game to officiate, and at the end of the day, most things are going to just be judgment calls by the officials as the play happens. However, the NBA could do a lot to improve overall quality by taking three measures: use only the best officials during the playoffs, rewrite and clarify both the rules and penalties associated with flagrant fouls, and instruct officials to start giving the benefit of the doubt to defenders when there is body contact near the basket when the offensive player is the one initiating the contact.

The first proposal would have obvious and immediate benefits. Currently the NBA uses almost half of its officials in the playoffs, sometimes regardless of merit. By using only 15 or so officials in the playoffs (even fewer would be needed in later rounds), they would be able to increase the quality of officiating while at the same time eliminate some of the discrepancies in calls due to differences between crews.

Secondly, the league does not call flagrant fouls consistently and uniformly. Anytime the league is forced to review calls after the fact and constantly upgrade personals to flagrant ones, while at the same time downgrade some flagrant twos back to flagrant ones, that should signal that there is something wrong with the standard. Flagrant ones are defined as unnecessary contact, while a flagrant two is unnecessary and excessive. Now almost anyone would recognize how subjective the concepts of "unnecessary" and "excessive" can be. I think it would be in the best interest of the league to redefine these fouls, or at least issue a memo clarifying them, in which it specifically describes the types of conduct that are required to receive the foul, including any intent necessary. For instance, they may decide that an elbow to the head with intent to elbow is a flagrant two, while and elbow without intent is only a flagrant one. While not every scenario could be specifically described, probably 95% of the common scenarios could be. The holes could be filled in through judgment by the league after the fact, for use as precedent for later games. I have no doubt that such a system would provide much more consistency, and at the end of the day predictability should be the goal.

Lastly, officials need to start letting more things go near the basket. Now I am a HUGE LeBron James fan, but even I have to admit that he at times can get preferential treatment from officials. And it is no fault of his. He is so big, strong, and fast that he can just slash to the basket and draw a foul. However, officials need to allow more types of contact near the rim in these situations. Obviously, if the defender moves his body into a position that impedes the offensive players progress to the basket, a foul should be called. But when a defender starts near the basket, or keeps himself between the offensive player and the basket the entire play, there is an acceptable amount of body contact that is not a foul. Until the league retrains officials to be more lenient for defenders, I think the quality of the basketball will suffer.