Ten Ways To Make X Better: Basketball
[Patrick Barron]
10. Use advantage calls on fast breaks.
Dunks are the best. On this we can all agree. Cynical fouls to prevent dunks are the worst, and there's a model out there for preventing them. Soccer refs will let fouls go if the team fouled seems to have an advantageous position. Basketball should adopt this for situations where there is about to be a breakaway dunk.
9. Eliminate hack-a-blank.
Allow teams to take the ball out of bounds with a reset shot clock instead of shooting free throws on a non-shooting foul. Like the previous bullet this is an attempt to reduce the number of situations where someone is intentionally violating the rules to their advantage. Don't @ me about how players who can't shoot free throws shouldn't be protected. Rules exist to make the flow of a game more pleasant to watch, and when they fail that they should be changed.
8. Get rid of the three-second call.
Nobody calls it. Its purpose has always been mysterious. The rationale is nonsensical: "open up the offense by restricting what offensive players can do." Clogging the lane is the least of modern basketball's concerns.
7. For the love of God please figure out how to call a charge.
Nobody knows what a charge is. I don't know, and you don't know, and refs don't know, and players don't know. The NCAA made things infinitely worse a couple years back with a change that made things even more confusing; one year of that was enough.
Charges get a bad rap. They're very dramatic. There's a dude on the ground fist-pumping; Teddy Valentine has recruited a crew of Busby Berkeley dancers, all of whom are pointing to the other end of the floor theatrically; the offender is grasping the basketball disdainfully and trying to murder the entire arena with his eyes. Duke ruined them for everybody, but now that there's a restricted circle their preferred tactic is no longer valid.
My suggestion on charges is to make the rule as simple as possible. If a player is moving parallel to the basket, outside of the circle, and gets plowed in the chest by an opponent who still has the ball, it's a charge. Glancing contact is a block. Taking a charge-type substance when the player in question has already released the ball is a no-call. Maybe it would need some tweaks, but the current regime is as close to completely random as possible.
6. No timeouts on out-of-bounds plays.
The final proposal here is the best plan I have to stop the scourge of timeouts, but if people continue to insist on having a break for tea and scones every ten seconds in the waning moments of a close game there are still some improvements that can be made. Number one is eliminating timeouts that come one nanosecond before a five-second call on inbounds plays. In all cases these timeouts reduce the drama of a game, because they prevent the team that's pressing from their shot at a critical turnover. Infuriatingly, they almost always come in the immediate aftermath of another timeout.
Say no to timeouts, in all their forms. But especially this one.
5. Adopt a draft and follow system.
This is discussed in more detail in a previous post. The upshot is that the NBA should move to a style of drafting closer to the NHL model, where everyone is automatically eligible for the draft. This allows drafted players to retain NCAA eligibility and prevents a lot of the consequences of bad draft entry decisions. I also suggest that NBA teams should have to offer longer contracts when they want to sign younger prospects—five year right out of high school, four after one year of college, etc.—and that drafted college players should be able to participate in NBA summer league.
4. Promotion and relegation for the NBA.
People keep talking about this in MLS, where it is dubiously viable and could lead to teams folding. The NBA's situation is vastly different, with an enormous new TV contract and the ability to support teams in Sacramento, Oklahoma City, and the like. The NBA also has an enormous tanking problem. Way too many NBA games are functionally exhibitions. Promotion and relegation fixes that.
Existing team owners looking to protect their franchise value could be a hurdle, but adding, say, ten expansion franchises and gradually splitting into two leagues of 20 teams would bring in enormous expansion fees, enough to offset the possibility of ending up in NBA 2.
3. Okay if you don't want to do that, something else to fix tanking.
First picks in the draft go to the winners of a post-season competition between teams that missed the playoffs. There are 14. The three best and three worst teams are omitted from an eight-team single-elimination tournament that gets played in the latter stages of the NBA playoffs. There is a third place game; top three get the top three slots in the draft.
This is more content to get money from. It turns the bottom three slots in the league into poison to be avoided, instantly upping the drama for the 8 teams at the bottom who are otherwise trying to lose games.
2. Goaltending is legal if you're 5'9" or shorter.
THIS WOULD BE AWESOME.
Sorry, Tom, you've got way too many fingers to call timeout [Bryan Fuller]
1. Coaches can only call timeout by cutting off one of their digits and handing it to the referee.
I admit my previous no-timeouts-ever stance was too radical. In the spirit of compromise, let us allow for timeouts if coaches are willing to take garden shears to their toes and fingers. If the situation truly calls for a little huddle on the sideline where the coach can remind his players to "play good" and "show effort", all it requires is one sickening moment of shredding flesh and cracking bone that forever alters a man. Should a long-time coach be so mutilated that he can no longer operate a pair of garden shears, a Make-a-Wish child can execute the act for him.
It is in this way timeouts can be responsibly managed.
If you are down 3 touchdowns with a minute to go in a football game, the game is in effect over. And it should be.
you are equating 3 TDs with 5 points in bball? not even close. that would likely equate to a 30 pt lead in basketball, rendering fouling in the last minute moot.
A ten-point lead, then. Two scores, the same as five points. I think his point his still valid that way.
Okay, that narrows things down for me.
The point is that at some point the game should be "over"--there is a margin that should be impossible to recover from. Obviously for you, that margin is somewhere greater than 5 and less than 30 points with a minute to go. (NOTE: I'm assuming that the trailing team doesn't have the ball with a minute to go, because 5 would be easy enough to score in 60 seconds if you have the ball at the start of those 60 seconds, even if you eliminate fouling).
The point is this: if you can't win the game without committing fouls against the other team, you shouldn't be able to win the game. Other sports recognize this; for whatever reason, basketball does not.
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Bill Simmons still has the best-ever solution to tanking: Have a lottery in which you get one ball for every game you win after being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. So a team like the Sixers would get to rack up balls since, like, January, but still would have maybe three.
The #1 thing that needs to happen with basketball, though, is to ever call traveling. Players literally cradle the ball on their hip and run with it. Like, three steps. Referees just pretend it doesn't happen even though it's the exact actual situation James Naismith wanted to prevent, because it "makes the game more exciting." Actually call traveling when a player is moving with the ball held in the arm like a football.
My biggest issue with Traveling at this point is how it is completely different in the NCAA versus the NBA. In the NCAA if you even do a good pump fake and blow by someone there's a ref waiting to call you for traveling because it might have LOOKED like it. In the NBA you can take 4-5 steps and it won't even get called. I would like a happy medium where they don't call it so tightly in the NCAA but actually call it in the NBA.....
I disagree, traveling is traveling. The rule is quite clear and easily enforcable. 2 steps is all you get after you pick up your dribble. Just enforce it. The refs should know what 2 steps is and they should know what a pivot foot is, unfortunately NBA refs make a mockery of the game by not calling it.
The rule is quite clear and easily enforcable. 2 steps is all you get after you pick up your dribble. Just enforce it.
Yeah, but that's not the rule and it is much more complicated than that.
http://phillyref.com/basketball/travelrules.html#nfhs_ncaa
Here's the most common instance, article 3 of the NFHS rule:
ART. 3 . . . After coming to a stop and establishing a pivot foot: a. The pivot foot may be lifted, but not returned to the floor, before the ball is released on a pass or try for goal. [ED: Here's your "two steps." The pivot foot CAN be lifted, but cannot return. On a layup, the dribble ends on that first step which becomes the pivot. On the second step, the first step is lifted and the ball is released before it returns] b. If the player jumps, neither foot may be returned to the floor before the ball is released on a pass or try for goal.[ED: This is often called when a player in triple threat goes to blow by his defender but moves both feet simultaneously before the dribble starts (released from hand)]
Maybe it's just me but I think the NCAA is getting a lot more lax in their enforcement of traveling.
NCAA has the same travelling rule as high school. NBA has some slight alterations and clearly has the officials just not enforce it in some situations (like when you catch the ball out on the perimeter). Having attended some training camps run by NBA and NCAA officials, I would assume that the NBA instructs officials to not call traveling if A) there's no advantage gained (slight shuffling of a perimeter player going nowhere) and B) if you're ad all not sure, never call traveling.
Traveling is a very difficult call to make to you're right on top of the play. It's actually easy to call from the TV in some situations.
I was so disappointed with him last night. Two days after the Bachelorette episode where Rodgers' brother admits he never talks to him and hints at some issues Rodgers has, Simmons interviewed Rodgers on his any wednesday show. He didn't ask a single question about his brother being on the bachelorette. Now maybe this was a condition of the interview, but the old Simmons - the one who wrote lengthy treatise about 90210 and other pop culture subjects - would never have let that opportunity pass.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12123632/bill-simmons-hbo-any-given-we…
They do tape the show, but I'm not sure how far in advance. But it's been known very early in the Bachelorette season that Jordan is Aaron's brother and Bill's wife is a huge bacheleror/ette fan so for him to not say anything suggests Aaron made that a contingency of the interview, which is really weird to me.
Bill Simmons still has the best-ever solution to tanking: Have a lottery in which you get one ball for every game you win after being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. So a team like the Sixers would get to rack up balls since, like, January, but still would have maybe three.
I don't know. I think this could just lead to tanking earlier on, since you're still rewarded for being bad. It's only after you've definitely proven yourself to be a bad team (eliminated from the playoffs) that you aren't rewarded for it.
In any event, I don't think a game between two non-playoff teams in late March is going to be very competitive under any system. At that point the players know the season's winding down and their vacations are coming. They're not going to break their backs for one ping-pong ball. The only solution I can really see is to expand the playoffs to give teams a more practical incentive.
I think it'd be awfully hard to be really bad in the first few months and then start being good later. That's a strange and very difficult balancing act.
On the second point, the players know the vacation is coming....but they also know they're playing for their jobs and contracts. They don't need the ping pong ball to have an incentive. The incentive is that some young guy is coming in, probably a pretty good one, and they don't want to be the guy that gets replaced. The Sixers as an organization may be tanking, but the Sixers' players aren't.
In theory, this is true; in practice, nearly all NBA players have guaranteed contracts, so they are pretty secure. (Not only does the team have to keep paying them down the road, it's also in the team's interests to play them as well, to keep their market value up if they need to be unloaded.) Only the impending free agents really have incentive to perform in those final few weeks if their team is going nowhere.
Simmon's play is assuming the best teams in the Western and Eastern Conference have relatively similiar records. If you have a team that leads one conference with 67 wins and another team leads the other conference with 55 wins, teams in the conference where the best team has 67 wins are going to get eliminated a lot sooner than teams in the conference where the leader has 55 wins.
Small correction: it assumes the 8th-place teams have similar records.
Point still stands. May even be exaggerated, the 8th-place team in the East is sometimes a ways under .500. That said, a really bad team in a good conference needs the help more than a really bad team in a bad conference.
If this rule was added Thon Maker would officially be listed as 5'9"
The incessant monitor reviews by officials need to stop. It seems like they get a majority of the reviews incorrect to begin with while taking three minutes to do so. This allows the coaches free timeouts when they aren't warranted. I like the idea of having reviews coach-requested on a limited basis.
Damn, Brian, you are going to get relegation applied to something in the USA before you're done.
It may be Roller Derby, but by damn, you are going to get it done.
we are screwed if we can't call time out on an OOB play...
Why let coaches call time out at all? They're not on the floor playing the game. Let the players make the decisions. If they're well coached, they'll know when to call time out. If they're not, they won't. (This should hold for football too).
10, 9, 8, and 6 should happen immediately. Alter 8 to not apply in the last 2 minutes of the game.
7 - Will always be a split second judgement call, but anything that can be done to improve consistency would be welcome
5 - Would be ideal, but so different from existing system that it will likely never happen, even with real-world example in other sports
4/3 - Great ideas, see #5. You could also drastically decrease the disparity in odds to get in the lottery. If it weren't that different from worst to #14, then maybe there wouldn't be so much tanking?
2 - Yes
1 - Delays from dudes in latex gloves cleaning up may disrupt flow of game. Unless coaches must cut off in advance, then only have that many to use?
That's a great way to ensure massive goonery. The only reason players contest layups instead of whacking the shooter is because they'll foul out. Take away the fear of fouling out and zero layups will be shot - everyone would rather take their chances at the FT line.
What about doing a modified power play type of penalty? After every 3 fouls (or whatever), the offending player needs to sit out for one minute and his team plays 4-on-5.
If the minute expires and the play is going on with no stoppage, can he just jump into the game? There's no provision for that in basketball, so that minute will likely last quite a bit longer. Remember, basketball doesn't consider a basket a stoppage.
Still don't really like it, because with substitutions and all, you could go a lot of fouls before a "power play." Still too much opportunity for goonery, IMO.
Unless you meant three team fouls, in which case half the game will be spent with one team or the other down a man. Or both teams down a man. Combine that with the inability to come in without a stoppage, and keeping track of that would make fans go insane.
No time outs on inbound plays? We will have 5-10 more turnovers per game...
That actually maintains the same number of TOs that currently exist in NCAA (4 fulls, 2 30-second), only separating them into two halves.
Given that NCAA bball already bakes time outs in every four minutes of game play, they could get away with three total.
The danger of that approach is that you're basically encouraging aggressive hard fouls from that point forth. If the team on defense fouls a bad free throw shooter away from the ball, they have a huge incentive to just cream whoever has the ball, to avoid the offense scoring a legitimate bucket.
Regarding #6 and #1: a huge issue I have with NCAA timeouts is when they are called by a team that has just scored a basket. In other words, the ball goes in the basket and the team that just scored calls a timeout before the defense can inbound the ball. There is no way in the world this should be permitted, and it isn't permitted in the NBA. A perfect opportunity to reduce the number of timeouts without really upsetting the people who call themselves "purists" because they oppose rule changes.
I think they should go to a FIBA model of only allowing timeouts during true dead ball situations (i.e., only when the referee is holding the ball). No timeouts during play, no timeouts during an inbound play once the team inbounding has the ball, no timeouts right after a basket.
This would lead to the glorious return of the inbounder throwing the ball off the defender's leg, head, crotch in an effort to both inflict pain on the source of his Inbounding frustration and get another chance to inbound when the ball bounced off someone's face and lands out of bounds.
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It boggles the mind why the NBA hasn't worked with the NCAA on a draft method similar to the NHL or even MLB. It really seems like it benefits all parties:
- NBA - Quality improves by allowing players to season longer
- NBA - Can take flyers on young players without the risk of having to stash them on the bench or pay them right away
- NCAA - Stars may stay longer if they need to develop or don't like the team who drafted them
- NCAA - More followers from NBA fans
- Players - Know their NBA status and can make an informed decision
I think there are a couple of obstacles to overcome:
- Compensation - I don't know how this works in the NHL or MLB, but if a team drafts you but keeps you in college for a year or two....then you blow out a knee - do you get any compensation? There should be some sort of minimum payout or insurance for that.
- Minor League - The NHL and MLB have larger rosters and stronger minor league systems as compared to the NBA. To implement this type of draft in the NBA there will need to be more rounds and they need to have something in place that allows some of those other picks to decide "I don't care if the Celtics don't need me - I'm coming to the league!" The good news is that it might help grow the NBDL or foster a relegation type of system with more teams if there are more draft picks. If the NBA can thrive in OKC, they can probably find a few more cities to support a team (Seattle, San Diego, Cincinnati, KC, etc.)
- NCAA idiots - For some reason there are some still clinging to the ancient definition of amaturism. This makes no sense when you consider that you're just adoping the same exact policy of the NHL or MLB. The remaining sticking point might be off-season things like Summer League or Training Camp for players still staying in college.
A colleague and I were talking about the D-League yesterday for some reason and I was shocked to see Andrew Harrison from Kentucky was playing for the team in Des Moines. That dude was a phenomenal player in college and I think everyone had him pegged as a sure-fire star at the next level.
It's crazy how unpredictable NBA talent is. They definitely have to fix the draft system/process. I think you're right - it would strengthen both the college and pro products.
much as possible. Reduce/eliminate timeouts. Make them stay seated or at least stay within a small coaching box. If any coach steps on the court while the game is in play it is an automatic ejection. I could go on. This should apply to all sports.
How does the NBDL fit in to the relegation plan?
There are going to be 22 DL teams in 2016-2017. 8 of them are independently owned (but affiliated with an NBA franchise) and the remaining 14 are owned by parent NBA franchises.
With 52 teams in the NBA and DL you could have a decent promotion relegation split of 30 NBA and 22 DL or 26/26 whatever you want. But how do you handle those 14 d league franchises owned by NBA teams? Force NBA franchises to sell off their D League affiliates?
This doesn't even take in to account D League players, some of whom have contracts with NBA franchises.
Okay, so I have 2 radical solutions to the foul fest at the end of games. They are very very radical, though, and would both eliminate the possibility of a dramatic "buzzer beater" shot, although I think there would be enough added drama that it would be worth it.
(1) Play 1 half of 20 minutes, and then 1 untimed half. The winner would be the first team to exceed the point total scored in the first half. In other words, say it's 35-30 at halftime. The first team to reach 66 (35+30+1=66) for the game is the winner.
Or (2) My preferred solution--Volleyball format. The first team to 21 points (25 in the NBA) in a quarter wins that quarter. If a team wins 3 quarters, that team has won the game. If it's 2-2 after 4 quarters, play an overtime--first team to 11 wins the game. For added drama & strategy, let's say that you have to win by 2 points to win a "quarter." The only problem would be announcers having to fill 20 minutes of dead air if a team wins in 3 sets.
I don't think this could be univerisally implented. In high school, middle school and even some of the lower levels of college (D3) you often times have a team with a player who is considerably taller than anyone on the other team. Take away the 3 second call and they'll just have that player camp under the basket.
My single least favorite play in basketball that isn't mentioned on your list is the "anticipated and-1" call that so many refs make. This happens when a guy is on a 1-on-1 fast break and the defender does some token amount of defense to prevent a basket. It doesn't matter if the defender breaths on the guy - the ref is blowing the whistle. In my opinion, the number of and-1 calls should be reduced overall.
For the life of me I cannot understand why Michigan doesn't get any calls around the hoop. How have we produced so many NBA guard/wing types and yet we are at the bottom of the national list for foul calls?
I always thought this would be a good solution for NCAA "realignment". Let the current Big 5 be the top level league and then line up the remaining conferences below each league as the 2nd division. A N. Illinois for Purdue swap could be interesting, even if its only temporary.
I don't know man. I think a good MAC program like N. Illinois would do very well if they started getting B1G money. They'd probably slide right into the middle of the B1G West.
And Purdue would probably never be heard from again if they stopped getting B1G money.
It sounds like Brian either doesn't like basketball or doesn't understand it.
the high school level and below along with many recreational leagues, the block-charge reform is probably the best idea. I like the simple idea of parallel movement and not requirng the defender to be in some militiatry formation pose in order to get the benefit of the doubt on an offensive player plowing into him to get a call.
But I will also tell you this, from an officials' standpoint, and it happes at every level of basketball, officials will always respond to effort and lack thereof, in doling out calls. You see it all the time on and-one calls. In fact, here's a little secret, officials are more likely to call the subtle and-one then one where the contact results from athletic contesting of a shot. They will also make calls in certain situations based on crowd reaction. Sometimes in favor other times giving the home crowd the benefit of a player foul or violation. There is truth to that and it's all base on human nature.
I don't have issue with your timeout reduction proposals. They could tweak the situation where a guy is about to inbound on the five second count and the count reaches 4 and the timeout is waived in favor of a violation. That makes sense to me. College coaches are now prohibiited from calling timeouts during game action. They can only come from players on the floor.
Timeouts at the college level have more to do with TV rights and commercial programming than concern about game flow. Again though this is all based on the official handling the situation and how the timeout request is sought. Sometimes coaches and their players fail to properly communicate or the offical doesn't hear the request in time. This happens a lot in a loud gym.
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