Do you? or Don't you?

[johnSandlin]

Had this happen this past Tuesday night at the end of my varsity assignment. Here's how she went down....

Home team hits a 3-pter to go up two.

Visiting team goes down the floor and is fouled by the home team and the clock stops on the foul call with 2.7 seconds left to go in game(BTW, not a bad foul by the home team beacause visting team had been hot from the land of 3 all night long.)

Home team takes a full time out to "ice" the free throw shooter.

Time out expires and we line up for FT's. Visiting team shooting double bonus with the best FT shooter at the line for the visiting team.

First FT is good. Visiting team now down by 1.

Second FT is missed and with about 1.4 seconds a jump ball is called by my partner. However, the clock operator barely heard either my partner's whistle or my secondary whistle and clock is stopped with 0.1 seconds left.

I reconfirmed with my partner on what call he had and my partner tells me I did not see the game clock. Knowing for a 110% fact that time needs to be back on the clock.

I pulled both head coaches together and told them what I saw and I was 110% sure of what I saw. I thus went on to tell them what we had call wise and what we were going to go with time wise.

The final call was a jump ball and putting 0.9 seconds back on the game clock to make it 1.0 full second on the game clock.

The visitng team missed a shot at the buzzer to win the game and the home team won by 1 point 63-62.

MY QUESTION TO ALL OF YOU....DID I DO THIS RIGHT??? I know what the rule book says about factoring reaction time inton resetting a game clock, and that is why I did not reset the game clock to the 1.4 that I saw because of factoring human lay time into the equation.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WITH THIS CALL THAT I MADE AT THE END OF THIS GAME?

[Rich]

I've always thought the lag time rule was a little inconsistent. If there's five seconds on the clock when the whistle blows and it goes down to four, no problem. Timer lag. If it goes down to 3, however, we put it back to 5 seconds.

If you were CERTAIN of the time when the whistle blew and more than one second of lag time came off the clock (NFHS) you are supposed to put ALL the time back on the clock. If one second or less came off the clock, you cannot put any time back on the clock. If you don't know how much time was left, you should leave the clock alone.

In any case where you need to put time back on the clock, you are not supposed to factor in ANY lag time. The correct solution in your play would be to put it back to 1.4 because more than one second came off the clock. However, if the clock had said 0.4, you would've left it alone because of the one second lag time allowed.

Realistically, I'm not good enough to KNOW down to the tenth of a second, but if the lag is over 1 second, I'll make a pretty good guess.

Read case play 5.10.1 in the NFHS Case Book.

[Edited by Rich Fronheiser on Jan 8th, 2004 at 10:44 PM]

[johnSandlin]

Thanks for the insight Rich. My partner and I spent a great deal of time after the game talking about this decision and we both agreed we went the right way with it.

But now, after reading more and more, I think we headed in the right direction with the decision, but we did not get all the way through the whole tunnel before making the decision.

[rainmaker]

Originally posted by Rich Fronheiser
If you were CERTAIN of the time when the whistle blew and more than one second of lag time came off the clock (NFHS) you are supposed to put ALL the time back on the clock. If one second or less came off the clock, you cannot put any time back on the clock. If you don't know how much time was left, you should leave the clock alone.

In any case where you need to put time back on the clock, you are not supposed to factor in ANY lag time.

Rich, that is the rule, and I agree with you that it's a little strange, but it's how we're supposed to do it. In terms of actual practice, it's almost impossible to get those tenths back on the clock correctly. The one game where I was watching and they were trying to get the tenths back up on the baord, the refs kept making the timer try again and again, until the coaches said, "Forget it!" That's how they handled it.

[bob jenkins]

Originally posted by rainmaker
Rich, that is the rule, and I agree with you that it's a little strange, but it's how we're supposed to do it. In terms of actual practice, it's almost impossible to get those tenths back on the clock correctly. The one game where I was watching and they were trying to get the tenths back up on the baord, the refs kept making the timer try again and again, until the coaches said, "Forget it!" That's how they handled it.

(Of course, this assumes that the clock can't just be set to tenths of seconds ...)

Set the clock to the next highest whole second. If using a hand-held device to time (like a remote), put one thumb on the "on" side of the swith and one on the "off" side of the switch. Turn the clock on-and-off as fast as you can ("ba-bump"). In practice, this will usually be .1 second. Repeat the on-and-off as needed to get to the correct time.

[rainmaker]

Originally posted by bob jenkins

(Of course, this assumes that the clock can't just be set to tenths of seconds ...)

Set the clock to the next highest whole second. If using a hand-held device to time (like a remote), put one thumb on the "on" side of the swith and one on the "off" side of the switch. Turn the clock on-and-off as fast as you can ("ba-bump"). In practice, this will usually be .1 second. Repeat the on-and-off as needed to get to the correct time.

Another useful little piece of detail to add to the "bag of tricks."

[just another ref]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by bob jenkins

Turn the clock on-and-off as fast as you can ("ba-bump"). In practice, this will usually be .1 second.

I think we have discovered the answer to that 2.4 seconds, throw it downcourt, how long did it take to touch it inbounds thing.