[SNIPERBBB]

Originally Posted by jTheUmp

Adding officials in other sports (especially football) makes sense, but I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense in basketball.

Basketball has 10 players in a relatively small space, so each official has to watch, on average, 3-4 players.

Football has 22 players on a field that's about 4.5 times the size of a basketball court. With 7 (or 8) officials, each individual official needs to watch 2-3 players at a time. With 5 officials, each official is watching 4-5 players, again on a much larger playing surface than basketball has.

I'm over-generalizing, of course, but my basic point still stands.

With that said, I'll be interested to see what happens with the NBA experiments.

Old man mechanics...6man basketball 2 old guys on each endline and 2 guys stuck in the middle.