To T or Not to T, that is the Question

[JugglingReferee]

Originally Posted by bob jenkins

Was your hand still up in the '"stop sign" to your partner. If so, you can easily support the fact that the ball didn't properly become live, allow the player to enter, put any time back on the clock and now properly administer the throw-in.

Originally Posted by OHBBREF

There are several issues here, all of which fall first on the officials.
if there were only four players on the floor their should have been a stop sign up for your partner because if a team has five eligable players they need to have them on the floor - so you need to stop the game until that happens

+1.

I'm doing absolutely whatever I can do to prevent this T. Even as the administering official, I do a quick head count. 5 + 5, not 10.

The girl accepted a statement from a person who is seemingly in an authoratative position when the scorekeeper, a member of the officiating staff, said, "...go ahead and go in..."

The word beckon (language used in the rulebook) seems to demand a signal, and it could be argued that verbal instruction is different that a hand signal. However, sometimes table crew are dressed in stripes, giving the impression that the table crew are at an authority level higher than expected, if not on-court.

Is it the substitutes' fault that (s)he doesn't know to wait for an signal (a beckoning) from an on-court official?

There was no intent to deceive here. Do what you can to avoid calling the T. Nevada's 10.1.9 situation is post #3 clearly has a deception act to it. There is no such deceptive element in the OP.

Furthermore, the OP says that the girl came to the table while the throw-in was not yet complete. And came in after the clock started. How much time elapsed between these two events? Maybe the girl thought she was told by her coach that she was taken out, and then found out she wasn't. Do we really want to penalize such events with a technical foul?

I am heavily going to interpret "approximately the same time" to be liberal in this case.

Sounds like an OOO to me, to stick with a T.

Originally Posted by OHBBREF

The timer does not have the authority to send a player into the game - and since the player did not arrive at the table prior to the warning horn - they can not enter the game until the next available oportunity. So a Technical for the Illegal substitution is waranted.

If the player was originally on the court they s/he is not a substitute, so then it goes back to my original point of an OOO. I know it happens all the time that one player is later than others. Tell me, how many of us have issued this technical foul?

In the end, I think issuing the T is a bad call.

Ref Ump Welsch, I think you did the right thing.

How did the coaches handle your explanation? Did you include the fact that the scorekeeper, a neutral party and part of the officiating staff, went outside their authority, and then even gave faulty information?

Originally Posted by JugglingReferee

How did the coaches handle your explanation? Did you include the fact that the scorekeeper, a neutral party and part of the officiating staff, went outside their authority, and then even gave faulty information?

Both coaches were receptive to my explanation. My explanation did include the fact the timer was the person involved, etc. The "home" coach was glad to avoid the T, while the "visiting" coach didn't care one way or the other (she was getting killed and it was during the 2nd half somewhere where it wouldn't have made a difference). This game was a very sloppy game. I think we called more violations (traveling and double dribbles) than there were points and fouls combined.

I think the coaches were just glad to get the game in, because one team had a 3-hour drive home, while the other was going to play the "neutral" school later that night, and hope they could make their 6-hour drive the next morning without hitting bad weather.