The state of NBA officials
American basketball has gone soft and Stern is responsible.
The NBA was too physical in the mid 1990's, but it's too soft now. It's up to David Stern to put it somewhere in between.
Here’s something that’s really getting to me: How come the NBA can’t get anything right?
It’s no secret that professional basketball in the United States has been going downhill with no brakes since the mid 1990’s. But there have been plenty of opportunities for Commissioner David Stern to set his league down the path of righteousness. Needless to say, he hasn’t done it, and he has actually made things a lot worse.
It started at the end of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s colorful careers. Michael Jordan had already established his legend with a couple of championships and even more scoring titles.
Suddenly, without a meeting or a memo, the NBA got ugly – fast. The New York Knicks and their ultra-physical play made the game into an Ultimate Fighting match, and the last team standing won the NBA title. The players, instead of respecting basketball and their league like their too-good-to-be-true predecessors, were brash and irreverent and immature.
They taunted and flaunted and didn’t care what you thought about it. That model still exists today with some select exceptions, but the NBA has allowed another evil to wear away at the integrity of the game.
Instead of the overtly physical style that the NBA ushered in during the Jordan Era, now Stern and his legion of trigger-happy referees have turned professional basketball into touch football. Hard fouls are relics, and might draw a flagrant call if the players breathe in the wrong direction.
Refs are calling more fouls – fouls that don’t affect the game and only serve to slow it down to a crawl. Everyone and their mother is shooting free throws and it takes four and a half hours to finish an NBA game.
Not only do these whistles make things extremely boring, but they prevent some of the old-school basketball techniques from making their necessary appearances in the modern game.
The biggest loss is the hard foul, and you saw that as recently as these Eastern Conference finals, where LeBron James had clearance from Detroit ground control to take flight with no interference.
We don’t want basketball to turn into an Arena Football game with seven-footers ripping each other’s faces off. But we also don’t want it to turn into figure skating. The Pistons should’ve been able to knock LeBron on his behind (while going for the ball, of course) without fear of tyrannical referees issuing a technical, a flagrant or an ejection.
The NBA playoffs are considerable better than the regular season, however, where guards are called for thinking about a hand-check and big men can’t make contact with another player for fear of the stripes.
So the NBA has made the transition from one end of the spectrum to the other. Too physical before, too fluffy now. Stern has to find a nice place in between to keep the fans in their seats.
There are many aficionados who think basketball should be a game of finesse and the referees should keep close watch on the physicality of the game. Fans remember a time when big men could back down smaller forwards for 10 to 15 seconds until directly under the basket. Muscle won back then, and it seemed too primitive and graceless.
But this is too soft. The refs’ ticky-tack nature has made for a game with no teeth and no edge. Teams that take a hard-line are being penalized, and there are players getting away with performances that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago.
It’s time to find a medium.
