NBA experiment
 

While the title of the article -- wanting an extra NBA official solely dedicated to watching for travelling -- sounds humorous, some on here might be interested to hear that the NBA is actually doing some experiments in the development league with using 4 and 5 officials.

http://www.sfgate.com/warriors/artic...n-10793776.php

A friend is an NBA official and we talked about this over the summer. 5 is too much. 4 may be too much. At some point there is a human aspect to the game. 4 or 5 still won't catch everything. We can't be perfect.


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They should just remove the officials from the court and adjudicate the game entirely via video.

They could just hire Jay Bilas! He could anounce the game and adjudicate it at the same time. Save some money while they are at it. :eek:

BNR may remember this....I was fortunate to be in a teaching session with Donnie Vaden two summers ago and we talked for darn near an hour about the idea of 4-person crews. He mentioned that other sports have consistently been adding officials/umps, if not for the regular season at least for post-season....so why couldn't the NBA as well? Then we went into various theories and proposals for how the 4-p mechanics would work. It was a scintillating whiteboard demo. Donnie sold Mark Cuban on the idea and evidently, since we're now at the point of experimenting during actual D-League games, he sold enough other people as well.

Hopefully some of our gurus can get some clips of these games and post them for our entertainment and debate.

I hate the idea. 3-man is ideal, IMO. Of course, I'll never work at a level that will implement this, so I am unaffected.

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.

How about tennis? There are up to 11 officials for tennis, with 2 players.

Using tennis as a reference, we should have 55 officials. :eek:

There are some people who think that running is a part of officiating basketball. Well, of course it is at levels where you can't have enough people.

But at the NBA level? We all know that we're better when we're stopped to receive a play and that we're weakest when making a call on the dead run. So why not have a crew with enough people to eliminate those weaknesses?

For us, we had to fight like hell to get to 3-person being the norm. I still hear from people (some of them officials) who think we should go back to 2-person at the varsity level. But there's no reason at the top levels to restrict yourself to this kind of thinking.

Isnt tennis officials based on the lines + the chair?

I think 4-man at the college nba where you have your traditional 3 man with the 4th official staying on the endline is quite feasible. Especially in transition and press situations. (Corner trap in transition if your lead is opposite is can be awkward.

As a contrast, soccer with 1 head ref on the field with 2 assistant ref's on opposite end touch (side) lines. 50-100 yds wide x 100-130 yds long.

And IMO, it's not enough.

Except that isn't accurate. At higher levels, all games have a fourth official who helps manage the touch line and provide advice via headset to the refree. (And sometimes a 5th, though the 5th official's job is generally nothing beyond being handy in case one of the assistant referees gets hurt.) And in some professional leagues, they use two Additional Assistant Referees, who are near the goal with the primary role of helping to identify fouls in the penalty area (they don't have flags, but are miked up with the referee). So that gets you to six actively involved referees in a UEFA match (plus one waiting for someone to get hurt). And FIFA is experimenting with adding Video Assistant Referees as well -- it looks like that is going to happen, and will involve at least two, so that one can be watching the current game while the other is reviewing replays if needed.

IMHO, the clarity of super-slo-mo review in HD has dramatically changed expectations at the professional level from fans, and trickled to those of us who referee other levels. (I'm a soccer referee and basketball dad.) I think players (and parents) used to be far more accepting of rough justice than they are in the world of precise television. When I was watching games on TV as a kid, you could only see some much detail -- now you can count nose hairs or the blades of grass between a football receiver's foot and the paint of the line. And mommy or daddy with the iphone is there to prove a mistake was made.