Quote:
Originally Posted by Raymond
Bottom-line, coach's team was not unfairly or adversely affected by the substitution. If he wanted a different player to come in also, he could have subbed that player in after the 1st free throw.
The disqualification period is not a free time-out.
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Agree.
To be fair, in my last post I was not aware of the DQ element. That adds a layer of complexity. But this still could have been handled better by both sides. I will focus on the officiating take-away here. Slow is fast. It seems like the crew was more interested in preventing the free time-out shenanigans than administering the sequence correctly. If indeed the coach claimed that the player at the table was there to replace a player other than the DQ'd player, then I'm apt to say, "Ok, that's fine coach, you have 15 seconds. Timer, give me a horn please." Now he's got his 15 seconds. Good luck doing anything with such a short amount of time, but if it makes him feel like he's smarter than me, that's fine.
But....after 15 seconds and another horn, I'm going to say, "Coach, I need your sub immediately." If a player doesn't stand up and start walking to the table right then and there, I will serve some tea, especially in a situation where I know the coach is trying to milk a free timeout. If this isn't the situation, i.e. the DQ truly caught the coach off guard and it doesn't appear he's trying to game the system, I'll probably give a few more seconds of slack.
I don't go looking for Ts for replacement intervals. I'll usually provide a very short grace period. But if you're being cute and trying to do with 15 seconds what teams used to do with 30/20 seconds (which is the reason the interval has been shortened over the years to begin with), then as another of our posters often says, "play silly games, win silly prizes."