Professional basketball in the United States is a nearly perfect sport. The elevated goal is unique in all of sport. Man has always been entranced by flight and the elevated goal makes the players appear to fly. Their acrobatic moves to get to the basket draw oohs and ahhs. Not for nothing are the players considered the best athletes in the world. The 24 second shot clock keeps the game moving. The three point line adds sharpshooting to hang gliding as sub-sports to the main. The dimensions of the court allow for spectators to be this close to the action and the game is physical without being violent. The architecture of the game is the work of geniuses.
There is a near fatal flaw in this perfection. The rules of play and the enforcers of those rules. The referees have too much power. Twenty or thirty or more times per game the referees stop this otherworldly action to call fouls. The rules interpreting violations for physical contact are subject to interpretation and ever-changing. The penalty for a foul, one or two free throws, is not sufficiently punitive to deter the conduct, nor to deter the referees from calling fouls and results in the mind-numbingly boring spectacle of these remarkable athletes standing around while one of them shoots free throws. By contrast, in soccer, a sport with similarities to professional basketball, there are far fewer interruptions in the flow of play, those that are are extremely brief, fouls that are called are for dangerous conduct and can get a player ejected whereby his team must play a man short for the remainder of the match. The penalties in soccer, in other words, are extremely punitive and as a consequence, fouls are rarely called.
At its worst this grave flaw in professional basketball has jeopardized the integrity of that architecture: the fixing of games (Tom Donaghy); taking out personal vendettas against particular players (Jake O’Donnell on Clyde Drexler). More common is honest refereeing that effects the outcome of a game and which becomes the story. Such was last night. In a marquee playoff match up between two glamour teams, Houston and Golden State, with some of the biggest stars, what the refs did call (56 fouls) and what the refs did not call led to a Golden State win and to today’s storyline of the game. To state the obvious that should not ever be the case but it was, it is, and it has too frequently been thus.
There is a near fatal flaw in this perfection. The rules of play and the enforcers of those rules. The referees have too much power. Twenty or thirty or more times per game the referees stop this otherworldly action to call fouls. The rules interpreting violations for physical contact are subject to interpretation and ever-changing. The penalty for a foul, one or two free throws, is not sufficiently punitive to deter the conduct, nor to deter the referees from calling fouls and results in the mind-numbingly boring spectacle of these remarkable athletes standing around while one of them shoots free throws. By contrast, in soccer, a sport with similarities to professional basketball, there are far fewer interruptions in the flow of play, those that are are extremely brief, fouls that are called are for dangerous conduct and can get a player ejected whereby his team must play a man short for the remainder of the match. The penalties in soccer, in other words, are extremely punitive and as a consequence, fouls are rarely called.
At its worst this grave flaw in professional basketball has jeopardized the integrity of that architecture: the fixing of games (Tom Donaghy); taking out personal vendettas against particular players (Jake O’Donnell on Clyde Drexler). More common is honest refereeing that effects the outcome of a game and which becomes the story. Such was last night. In a marquee playoff match up between two glamour teams, Houston and Golden State, with some of the biggest stars, what the refs did call (56 fouls) and what the refs did not call led to a Golden State win and to today’s storyline of the game. To state the obvious that should not ever be the case but it was, it is, and it has too frequently been thus.
