Made Free Throw substitution

[tigerb]

Was attending a game and this is the sitch. Team A at the line with sub for shooter waiting. FT goes in, team A relaxes waiting for sub. Team B inbounds ball quickly and gets down floor before press set up. Team A has to foul to stop clock.

Is this a reversable situation?

[Lotto]

Originally posted by tigerb
Was attending a game and this is the sitch. Team A at the line with sub for shooter waiting. FT goes in, team A relaxes waiting for sub. Team B inbounds ball quickly and gets down floor before press set up. Team A has to foul to stop clock.

Is this a reversable situation?

This sounds like a poor job on the part of the table and the officials. With a sub waiting at the table on the last free throw, the table should sound the horn as soon as the FT goes in and the officials should stop play right then and there to let the sub come in.

That having been said, there's nothing that can be done once B gets the ball and inbounds it.

[Mark Padgett]

Originally posted by tigerb
Was attending a game and this is the sitch. Team A at the line with sub for shooter waiting. FT goes in, team A relaxes waiting for sub. Team B inbounds ball quickly and gets down floor before press set up. Team A has to foul to stop clock.

Is this a reversable situation?

Yeah - the officials should reverse their direction and walk backwards out of the gym, right behind the table chimps who didn't sound the horn.

[walter]

Originally posted by tigerb
Was attending a game and this is the sitch. Team A at the line with sub for shooter waiting. FT goes in, team A relaxes waiting for sub. Team B inbounds ball quickly and gets down floor before press set up. Team A has to foul to stop clock.

Is this a reversable situation?

No it is not reversible. It shouldn't have happened because obviously someone wasn't paying attention to the table (either trail, lead, or center); the sub wasn't there in time to be beckoned on, etc. The players should play until either time expires or a whistle blows. Obviously team B kept playing. Substitutes are always a topic for my pregame (when are they legal, who calls them in, etc.).

[daves]

I always make it a point to look at the table before the free throw is administered. If I see a sub there I will get ready to blow the whistle as soon as the FT is made. I don't rely on the table person sounding the horn. Sounds like the officials blew it.

[jbduke]

ACC fans of 7 years or more will recognize a slight variation on the aforementioned play immediately. In the 1997 game between Duke and Virginia at Charlottesville, Norman Nolan of UVA went to the line for two with the score tied with about six seconds left in the game. He missed the first. UVA coach Jeff Jones, knowing that Coach K's preference in this situation is not to call a TO and let the chips fall, sends a sub to the bench once the ball is handed to Nolan for the second free throw, hoping to set his defense in the event of a make. The free throw rolls around the rim about three times, the din growing more extreme by the millisecond, until it finally goes in. As soon as the ball falls through the net, the clock-keeper is sounding the horn. Unfortunately, it was too loud to hear the horn, and the T on the free throws, Rick Hartzell (an outstanding veteran official), got brain lock and forgot that the sub was there. The clock-keeper sat on the horn for several seconds before realizing that play had been allowed to resume and the clock needed to be running, but the officials, not hearing it, didn't acknowledge it, and Steve Wojciechowski took the in-bounds pass the length of the floor and drew a shooting foul near the basket. At this point, the clock read about four seconds.

When the officials looked up at the clock, they knew something had gone badly wrong, so they went to the table to check. After being told what had happened, the crew huddled for a couple of minutes before deciding to go to the replay to check to see if Virginia's claim was true: to wit, that if the clock had been started on time, time would have expired before Wojo was fouled. This was Jones's second claim, actually. His first was that a do-over should be played, with the sub being allowed to enter, time being put back on the clock, and Duke inbounding underneath the Virginia basket with the original time remaining. Frank Scagliotta said no dice on that one. Paraphrasing here: "Jeff, if Wojo hadn't been fouled and he had missed the shot, you'd be saying the game is over."
Jones knew he had been trumped with that line of reasoning.

So they took a stopwatch out and looked at the replay about five times, timing it each time. They took the average length of time expired on the stop-watch, and subtracted that time from the game-clock. They ended up putting .5 on the clock and Wojo on the line for two. He made both, and Duke won the game. Replays showed that Hartzell had checked after the first free throw and recognized the sub, but he just forgot about him after the second shot. He wrote the Virginia AD and team an apology letter the next day. The crew (I can't remember the third member) was suspended for one game.


The moral, as others have already posted, is always to check the table. And in this case, remember the information such checks yield.

jb

[jbduke]

Make that 6 years, not seven. The Duke math department is not that great.