Duplicate numbers

[mikesears]

The first thing I do as an official is I count the number of players on the team I am watching and report it to the official who looks at the scorebook. I always count twice to make sure I have the right number of players. If my number and the number of players in the book do not match, we know we have a problem. Either I miscounted (twice), there is a player who is not on the floor for the pregame warm-up, or there is a player not in the book.

If I am checking the book, I hope the official scorer put all the players in the book in numerical order (recommended but not required). I try to check for duplicate numbers but I can certainly imagine missing duplicates if there are 15 players in the book NOT in numerical order.

Bottom line is that I think we need to take our pre-games seriously and we might be able to avoid this situation.

Just a thought.

Thanks! Good topic.