Wow!

[daves]

Originally posted by Mark T. DeNucci, Sr.
I am sure that all of us have had a player pass a live ball directly to you thinking that you were a teammate. I have had it happen to me at least a couple times a season. Thank goodness, I have never went brain dead and caught the ball.

But if the official did catch the ball, how should he handle it. We will dispense with the official touching out-of-bounds scenario, because the player who threw the ball caused it to go out-of-bounds. So the only other scenario is if the official is completely inbounds.

As we all know the official is part of the court that he is touching. I think that the official (who caught the pass) could make a good case for treating the situation as if the ball had become lodged between the flange of the basket and the backboard. Meaning the officials would go to the alternating possession arrow.

Lets apply this logic to the play in the original posting. If the Lead official in this play (assuming that he was completely inbounds) made a conscious decision to keep the ball from going out-of-bounds by tapping the ball to the offensive player. Then the Trail official could make a good case applying the situation which I described in the previous paragraph. I think that it is the only logical way to handle the situation.

Sounds like an interesting way to handle it. What rule would you use for this? Would it be the elasticity clause? I don't have my rule book handy so I don't know the exact wording. Doesn't it give the referee authority to make a call if it's not covered in the rules? What if the lead in this play were the referee? I would hope they had better judgment than to do this but the trail would have no recourse in this situation. If I were an official and caught a pass reflexively, I would drop the ball where I stood and not blow my whistle.