[sj]

Last night in a high school summer league I had a play that I don't think I've had happen before. At least the way it did. I'm trail. A1 is dribbling parallel to the free throw line when B1 comes up on him and bumps him a little. It throws him a bit off his path and sort of turns A1 around so he is going to start to dribble back the other way. At this point I had nothing. A1 had not been trying to go around B1 or anything. The bump caused him a little trouble but it just wasn't enough to call and it looked like he was recovering just fine. However B2 came streaking up the lane and stole the ball clean as A1 was turning back the other way. He went in and made an easy layup.

I would bet that 99% of refs would leave the bump, in and of itself, alone just like I did. But then it turned bad. In actuality A1 was still recovering from what little contact there was. He was going to be fine and I have no problem thinking that at that point I had done the right thing. But A1 was definitely still in a recovery process as the ball was stolen. When the ball was stolen I just froze knowing that I had a problem as I had not seen him coming. I didn't blow my whistle because by the time I got unfrozen B2 was long gone. I think I should have gone ahead and called it even though it would have looked "late."

So maybe a good question to ask here is, using fanboy terminology,.....how late is too late?