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Whistles are to be blown, not swallowed |
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Written by Constantine Scionti
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Thursday, 05 June 2008 |
Every year it seems the same discussion comes up during the playoffs about the refs “swallowing the whistle” at the end of close games to “let the players decide it.” This is terrible for a couple of reasons, and really should be stopped.
The first and most important reason has to do with the structure of the game of basketball. Any game has rules, of course, and it is these rules that make the game possible at all. In fact, the rules of a game are more about what players cannot do than they are about what the players can do. In order to score in basketball, you have to put the ball in the hoop. Think of all the possible human behaviors that could result in the ball going through the hoop, and you will see that it is a very limited number of possibilities that are allowed in the game. If you want to say that you are playing basketball, you have to put the ball in the hoop while not violating any of the proscriptions in the rule book; if you tuck the ball under one arm and run down the court like a halfback, stiff-arming anyone who gets in your way before climbing on your teammate’s shoulders to throw the ball up through the hoop, you are not playing basketball.
The rules of NBA basketball have evolved and been tweaked steadily in the attempt to create a sport that would be fun to watch, and while many of us have some quarrels with some of the rules as they are written and, especially, as they are enforced, I think we can all agree that NBA basketball can be a fun, exciting sport to watch. The rules form a balancing act between what the offense is allowed to do to score, and what the defense is allowed to do to stop them, and they are written to produce a fast-paced, fair sport. The more deviation is allowed to creep into the game, the further it wanders from being pure NBA basketball. There is simply no way to keep the game functioning the way the NBA intends when the rules are not being enforced as written. Under these circumstances, what you end up with is too much clawing and grabbing as the players engage in a game of chicken with the officials, seeing how much they can get away with before they get called for a foul. We do want them playing basketball not How Far Can I Push It Before I Get Caught, right?
This does not come up in any other sport. Imagine it’s six all in the fifth set of the Wimbledon finals, and the linesmen want to “let the players decide it.” What would that mean? Only call a ball out if it misses by more than a foot? Let a player hit the ball after two bounces, as long as he almost got there? Or bottom of the ninth in game seven of the World Series—should the umpire only call a runner out if he’s out by more than a step, to make sure the players decide it? The question itself is kind of a head-scratcher.
Only by enforcing the rules the same way all the time are you truly allowing the players to decide the outcome of the game of basketball, since violations of the rules are by definition outside the permitted ways to score, or stop the other team from scoring, and therefore in a sense not basketball. But if you still think that not calling fouls constitutes letting the players decide it, there are a couple of slippery slopes you may want to consider.
The common way to look at it is that, at the end of playoff games the refs should swallow the whistle. Here’s the first slippery slope. When does the end of the game actually start? Usually it’s reserved mostly for the last possession, but this is patently unfair. Consider a game tied with 35 seconds to go. Team A gets the ball and is working the ball in, when a player from Team B reaches in and hits the ball handler’s arm, the foul is called, and he goes to the line for two free throws. Now Team B gets the ball with less than 24 seconds to go in the game, and the refs “let the players decide it” from here on. A player from Team B penetrates into the paint, and goes for the shot, but is hit in the process and loses the ball, no foul is called. Clearly this is unfair, since the same thing happened on both ends of the court, and it is only called on one end.
So, should the refs swallow the whistle for the last minute? Is there going to be an official time for this to start? But this is where the logical problems really start: don’t we always want the players to decide the game? If not calling fouls unless they are egregious enough that the refs are “forced” to call them is really the best way, shouldn’t that start at the beginning of the game, and then why just in the playoffs? The principle of letting the players decide should be the goal of every game from the start of the season. So if you believe in it for the last minute, you have to believe in it from the first minute.
The other slippery slope now comes into it. If the refs let the players get away with a little bending of the rules, where will they stop? They have already passed out of the letter of the law in swallowing the whistle, so now we have to rely on the judgment of the officials to remain consistent, calling everything the same way. And how do you get all the officials to have the same view of what is really a foul, if they are no longer bound by the definitions clearly stated in the rulebook? Basketball is already a game that requires a whole lot of judgment on the part of the officials, but at least there are rules which can be pointed to in order to say, “That was a foul.” I would rather not open every game up to hour long discussions of referees justifying themselves by saying, “Sure, by definition that was a foul, but under the circumstances I didn’t think it was so bad.”
And there will be a small (by which I mean huge) integrity issue for the NBA to deal with if something controversial happens, say at the end of a playoff game. Hypothetically, how would the fans feel about it if a team were down two points at the end of a playoff game and had the ball, and a defensive player jumped into the ball handler, and the foul wasn’t called when it should have been? Might that not bring up charges of favoritism? At least the league would never let an official with a known—or even just suspected—personal vendetta against a star player officiate that big playoff game, right? Of course, that is an extreme example, I mean, it’s not like an official has ever been suspended for challenging a star player to a fistfight, or anything absurd like that. Or even worse, had ties to gambling.
[For those who don’t follow the NBA very closely, those not so hypothetical referees would be Joey Crawford and Tim Donaghy, respectively]
Whether or not my philosophical objections are persuasive, I believe most would agree that these practical problems to swallowing the whistle make it impossible to implement in any kind of fair way. This alone should make the NBA go back to calling a foul a foul, no matter who commits it, or when it happens—it’s the only way to ensure that we get to see the world’s best basketball played fairly.
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Random Hoops
“Net income for the entire tournament exceeded $500,000 for the first time. Factoid
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