Changing the way so-called “transition fouls” are officiated this season won’t keep them out of the NBA game.
In fact, the league believes this kind of play can now make the game better.
The long-awaited rule change – one of the NBA’s education points for this season – was a major talking point this week for umpires, who gathered for their preseason meetings now that the camps practice around the league are about to open. There are other points of attention, but the changes to be taken may be the most important.
“Some of our best games in the NBA are defensive basketball. We don’t want to discourage that; in fact, we think this rule will encourage that because now we’re asking you to make a legitimate play on the ball,” said Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s senior vice president overseeing referees and training.”From that perspective, we think more exciting basketball is on the horizon and those transitional scoring opportunities — both defensively and offensively – can be highlights. We’ve lost some of that and we think this rule is going to inject that exciting play back into our game.”
The gripping foul – in which the defender does not play on the ball – is what the league classifies as a foul that occurs either “during a transition scoring opportunity or immediately after a change of possession and before the offensive team has had the opportunity to advance. the ball.” The exception is in the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter or extra time.
The new penalty for such a foul is a free throw, which may be attempted by any player of the injured team in play at the time the foul occurred, as well as continued possession by the injured team.
But the league also hopes that defenders who play on the ball in these situations lead to exciting plays, whether the bet leads to the offensive team getting an easy score or the defensive team earning a turnover.
“Our players and coaches are doing a good job,” McCutchen said. “They are good at their job, because they are committed to their job. They will absolutely stop doing this if we are consistent in our work, which I fully foresee. Then they will know how to frame it properly. And therein lies the glory of transitional basketball fed back into our game.”
Other education points this season are holdovers from past years, such as players having the freedom of moment both in the post and on the perimeter, setting appropriate screens, avoiding travel and having “respect for the game” – which often means not being overly demonstrative towards referees or others when a call does not go their way.
Bench conduct will also come under closer scrutiny, after an increase in recent years of players standing on their bench during play and often encroaching on the touchline or baseline – perhaps getting a little too close to the bench. ‘stock.
“It’s going to be a small change,” McCutchen said. “We want the players on the bench to be able to react spontaneously to an exciting basketball game. But it is important that they do not support the whole match, because now you are entering into problems of game integrity, possibility of injury to game participants, we want to eliminate all this.
There’s another change coming, one where some teams won’t like to see the light go on.
When the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, changes the score during play — usually whether a 3-point shot was truly a 3 or a 2, or whether or not a basket beat the 24-second clock — a blue light will flash at the scorer’s table, indicating that a decision is about to be announced.
And this change will be announced at the first neutral opportunity, which means that a game could be stopped in certain situations to update the score.
It’s designed to eliminate situations like Game 7 of last season’s Eastern Conference Finals, when Miami’s Max Strus scored 3 early in the third quarter for the Heat in their game against the Boston Celtics. . About 3 minutes of playing time passed before Miami fans were alerted that those three points were off the scoreboard, after the replay center said Strus was out of bounds – although the Heat supported that night that they hadn’t seen any definite angles saying he was clearly on the line.
Miami ended up losing 100-96.
“The new interpretation is going to allow us to speed this up exponentially so that everyone has the best real-time information as close as possible,” McCutchen said.
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