We had an interesting call last night involving a potential illegal sub. Here is the scenario:
We had four subs at the table waiting to get called into the game. Once a travel occurred on our opponent the official beckoned in the FOUR subs. When the ball went into play we discovered we only had four players on the floor. Once we detected the lack of required players the ball was advanced into the front court (our bench was on the opposite side of the floor)and our 5th player (previously in the game) ran onto the floor. We were immediately called for an illegal sub and issued a bench technical foul.
The crew we had was/is very experienced and was 100% confident in the call. The game was not in doubt and since we basically goofed the whole thing up I did not put up any fight but it seems to me this is not the right call. However, I am only a coach and outside of knowing how many points a basket is worth I am pretty clueless, despite nearly 20 years coaching
I will add the ref indicated I would have had to take a time out to enter the sub. To me this does not seem correct as I would not be entering a sub but rather a player that was already in the game but mistakenly walked off the court during a mass sub situation. so here are my questions:
1) Should a technical been issued?
2) What kind of technical? Is this assigned to the player that committed the violation by entering the floor and thus a personal foul? Is it added to the team fouls? Does the seat belt rule come into effect for this type of technical?
3) Hypothetically, if #1 is in the affirmative then in the situation where the ref places the ball on the floor after a team is slow to come out of the time out and begins his/her five second count then would there be five illegal subs as they would all run onto the court after the ball was placed in play?
Thanks for any answers and/or insight. As I mentioned this was a very good and experienced crew. To me this does not make sense unless the player was not on the floor previously. Now the crew mentioned they should not have entered the ball without ten players on the court. We even had a friendly barb when later in the game prior to entering the ball he reminded the other team they needed another player on the floor