Sorry, but I will once again differ entirely from most if not ALL of your opinions here. Fry me if you want, and I'm not saying the incorrect call was made by today's rules/interps on the b/c plays, but I'm gonna stick up for the offensive player(s) on this one. What's a guy supposed to do? The VT player's dribbling in a straight line towards his basket, the defensive player takes a position in that line (LGP), dribbler sees path blocked and CHANGES PATH, planting his right foot and begins to make move to his left to go by defender, who reacts to this move by throwing himself into this NEW path. Sure he takes it in the chest from the offensive player, cuz he put himself there, leaving no chance whatsoever for the dribbler to do anything else. And for those of you saying the dribbler was responsible because he ducked and lowered his shoulder, try dribbling in a little traffic and make a crossover and do it standing up and not going into a bit of a forward lean..it's a natural movement. When he decided to go to his left there was space and he got into that space, only to encounter the defender has thrown himself there. IMO, to call plays this way is just wrong and is taking away from the game. I know by rule no time and distance are needed, but I would argue that there should be. It is NOT what I feel the player control fouls were originally written for: to give a defender a legit chance of standing his ground on a guy intent on driving to basket or any other spot regardless of anyone in his way.
Contrast this Duke-VT play (and countless others like it) with a play last night where Lebron is called for a block on a Curry drive (prob midways thru 3rd Q)..look at that and decide which defender did more to impede guy with ball. Maybe NBA looks at this differently...
I know this has been debated over and over here and sure looks like I'm the lone ranger on this once again, but I'm not gonna change my opinion of it
Thu Feb 26, 2015, 07:34pm
Similar Threads
Hybrid Mode
