Rich wroteUsually we have something more important to watch than the ball.
Let's not overstate this, and confuse rookie officials. We do have to watch for basket interference, goaltending, the ball going out of bounds, and whether, or not, the ball goes in the basket. Watching the ball may not be, better yet, is not, the most important thing that we look for, but it should be somewhere on the list, even if it's on the bottom of the list. In my embarrassing example above, I had two higher priorities than watching the ball, but at least we knew that nobody saw the ball go in the basket, or not go in the basket, so we sought help (the table) to get it right.