Being told a player had four fouls.
 

I have a question for all of you officials who want the Scorer to tell you when a player has four fouls. Where in the Rules, Casebook (Approved Rulings), Officials Manual, etc. where this is required or even recommended? You cannot tell me because you will not find that sort of nonsense anywhere.

Officiate the ENTIRE game. Yes, we has officials do change how we officiate the end of a blow out as oppposed to a close game. But, we do not worry about whether a player has four fouls or not. I do not want to hear anything about "cheap" fouls being called against a player with four fouls. An official's criteria should be is this a foul per the game's end of game situation. It is just nonsense that officials do not need to know or should care about knowing.

Furthermore, a coach knows (or should at least know) when one of his players has four fouls, and it is his decision whether or not to leave said player in the game with four fouls.

MTD, Sr.

Also, what if the scorer refuses? "No, that is not listed as one of my duties and I feel that my giving you that information could be judged to be improper by either side." Then what?

The referee gets to designate the official scorer. He can simply replace the person with someone who will comply with the desired instruction.

Of course, this would lead us into a discussion of whether it is proper to replace a table person when they aren't failing to do any of their appointed duties.

We ask scorers to do many things that are not listed specifically in the rulebook. I know the scorer in most places tells the teams on their own how many timeouts are left and I do not see anyone getting their panties in a bunch over that. On Saturday I was doing a game that was on live TV and the scorer was helping us with the media timeouts by standing. I do not see that in the rulebook either. You cannot make everything about the rulebook because we do a lot of accepted things that are explicit in the rulebook.

Now would I ever tell a scorer to tell me this? No. I just think we cannot always talk about what the rulebook says or does not say or we would never do a lot of things as an official.

Peace