2011 Tournament Discussion Redux

[rulesmaven]

Originally Posted by Texas Aggie

There was 1.4 seconds on the clock. Can you give me an example of any teams that have gone full court and scored in 1.3 or less?

The first call was correct. Player was forced into either a travel or OOB by contact. No choice but to call a foul. Second one should have been ignored. Even IF you can make a case for a foul in that situation, the score is tied with little chance of a score absent a call. Leave it alone, play 5 minutes more and then any call or no-call becomes moot.

Had one team been ahead, you can argue the foul. If there's a chance for OT, absent the prevention of a valid scoring attempt, go to OT. There's no advantage gained by grabbing an arm 90 feet from the basket with about a second left. No one here has yet made the case for such an advantage. Ordinarily, without an unfair advantage in a contact situation, we're going to leave it alone.

I was talking about the first foul, so we seem to agree on that.

On the second, I agree with you that there was very little chance for Butler to score and that it would have been unprecedented. Which is exactly why it was so dumb for the Pitt player to foul him so blatantly right in front of the official. Fouls are called all the time on the shooting team 94 feet from their defensive basket on free throw rebounding action. Under your definition of "advantage," which seems to be limited only to whether a player could score, there is never advantage on those plays either, but they walk to the other end to shoot in the bonus. I'm not seeing why it should be different.

It was a tie game. Pittsburgh kept its players in the lane on the free throw for a reason -- because there was enough time for them to try to win with a basket even if the free throw was missed. The player committed a foul in a situation where gaining possession might have given him the chance to win the game.