[Hawks Coach]

Originally posted by Mark Padgett

This is my biggest pet peeve. The rule is there for a reason. If a player commits an intentional foul in this situation, his team should suffer the consequences. If you make the call according to the rule and administer the penalty properly, then it is the player who is deciding the outcome of the game, not the official.

If you choose not to make the correct call because of the severity of the penalty (or for any other reason), then you, not the player, are determining the outcome of the game.

This is the same misguided philisophy that causes some officials not to call fouls at the end of a close game unless they are "hard" fouls, even though they've been calling a certain level of contact a foul throughout the entire game.

This is just plain flat-out wrong.


Now, I'll tell you how I really feel about it.