WNBA Follies ...

[BillyMac]

And one?

WNBA Refs Award Made Basket For Shot That Clearly Did Not Enter Basket

[ODog]

Wow. Too late to correct in high school.

Not sure about other rule sets, but apparently WNBA is similar to NFHS on this one.

[BillyMac]

Three, top notch, professional, basketball, officials, and nobody saw the ball not go in?

I shouldn't be too hard on these guys. A few years ago, in two person game, as the trail, I had a foul from behind against a player in the act of shooting, in the lane. My partner, the lead, also had a whistle a split second after mine, and the foul resulted in crash, and a lot of bodies lying in the lane area. In the time it took me to figure out who was going to report the foul, (my partner), and if anybody was seriously hurt on the floor (they were not), I failed to observe if the ball went in the hoop, as did my partner. We had to ask the crew at the table if the ball went in (it did).

[Rich]

As an official, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Usually we have something more important to watch than the ball.

[BillyMac]

Originally Posted by Rich

Usually we have something more important to watch than the ball.

Let's not overstate this, and confuse rookie officials. We do have to watch for basket interference, goaltending, the ball going out of bounds, and whether, or not, the ball goes in the basket. Watching the ball may not be, better yet, is not, the most important thing that we look for, but it should be somewhere on the list, even if it's on the bottom of the list. In my embarrassing example above, I had two higher priorities than watching the ball, but at least we knew that nobody saw the ball go in the basket, or not go in the basket, so we sought help (the table) to get it right.

I know the WNBA has been experimenting with ways to make their game more exciting but I think this is going a little overboard.