What’s the Deal With the NBA Contact Ban?
An old criticism of the NHL was that once the playoffs started the referees looked the other way and nary a penalty was called. Now, in 2008, the opposite is happening in the NBA playoffs. For some reason the league decided there will be no excessive contact whatsoever. They will not let the guys play. It’s a decision that’s led to a horde of flagrant fouls, lots of testy chest bumping, and the travesty of Darius Songaila’s game 6 suspension.
My question is, why? As far as I can tell the contact crackdown has two main consequences and both of them are bad.
First, the borderline flagrant fouls are leading to more jawing, chirping, and shoving than ever before because the delay caused by referees deciding whether to call a flagrant only builds the tension. Instead of quickly sending the players to the line and have the game continue, there’s a two minute break for the crowd to get rowdy and players to jaw at each other.
In the cases where a flagrant is called, the other team then has to play the rest of the series thinking “they got one of our guys, we have to get them back.” Obviously blatant flagrant fouls should be called (like LeBron’s elbow to Andray Blatche in their playoff opener. Wait, what? A flagrant wasn’t called on that play? Interesting…), but calling flagrants on clean hard fouls just riles teams up.
The second consequence of these flagrant fouls is that the post-season is being refereed different than the regular season. In general, that’s bad for a sport. The weird thing is this crackdown on hard fouls should eventually lead to better basketball games. When a guy is going in for an uncontested layup you shouldn’t just be able to grab him. Every single foul should be a legitimate block or steal attempt. If a game were called this way (and any kind of intentional foul was called a flagrant) there would be fewer fouls, fewer stoppages, more scoring, and a more fluid game.
David Stern should be working on providing this kind of product, but he should be working on it during the regular season, not during the playoffs (the time when teams are supposed to play tough and games are supposed to have more contact). Clearly Stern didn’t want these NBA playoffs to turn into a string of UFC fights, but a better way to accomplish this would have been cutting down on the hard, intentional fouls during the regular season.
Hopefully the league will continue the intentional foul crackdown next season. At least then some good will have come out of this debacle. It seems like a dream, but perhaps someday, sometime, a poor foul shooter will blow by his man and not get bearhugged on the way to the basket.
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