6 Players...Whose Responsibility Is It?

[IREFU2]

Originally Posted by Jurassic Referee

My, oh my.....more paralysis by analysis.

1) It is the head coach's responsibility to ensure that he has the proper number of players on the court. It is NOT the responsibility of the officials and it NEVER has been the responsibility of the officials.
2) Yes, we as officials try to ensure that the proper number of players are on the court. However, sometimes sh!t happens. It happened in an NBE game t'other week and all three officials missed it. If it does happen, just damn-well deal with it instead of going through these stoopid, non-sensical blame games. We've got very explicit rules in place to deal with these situations. When in doubt, it's not a bad idea to try using those rules.

Lah me.....

I agree here, its the coaches job to do this. We do it as part as of our game management.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by beachbum

If there was a 5 second count, and then the official counted the number of players on the floor, he or she could administer a penalty for more than 5 players to the offending team. This would place more burden on the coaching staff to get the players off quickly. After a short time coaches would train the kids to get off quickly, and we would have less problems to deal with.

Isn't this kind of like the football rule?

[BillyMac]

Who's responsibility is it to see that only five players are participating from each team?

By rule? The team.
By mechanics? The officials.
Anybody else? Head coaches, assistant coaches, players, substitutes, and the table crew.

If all of the above do their job correctly, you'll never have six players participating at the same time. If one of the above screws up, the "buck stops" at the team, and the team is penalized with a technical foul.