I have a very general notion that rules in sports should be simple and easy to enforce. The less room for error we give them, the fewer mistakes officials will make. And fewer mistakes mean fairer game play, which everyone generally agrees is good.
So, what's wrong with loose balls?
- Broken plays lead to unfortunate advantages;
- they go out of bounds; and
- they result in fouls.
The second problem would not be a problem except that when the ball goes out of bounds, the officials decide who last touched it and reward it to the other team. This is a system fraught with potential disaster. How often have you seen them blow this call? It happens all the time. So, I'm proposing a rule change. Basketball at almost every level has a possession arrow that determines which team is awarded the ball at various epochs in the game (e.g. jump balls in NCAA basketball). Why not use it more regularly? Don't punish the defense for knocking the ball out of bounds. Determine possession using the arrow, and then flip the sucker.
Changing this rule wouldn't necessarily fix the timeout-call-while-falling-out-of-bounds play that nobody really likes (if you have the possession arrow, you might prefer to save it for later, and if you don't, then you still need the ball), but it would fix the nastiest play in basketball. There would no longer be any incentive whatsoever for throwing the ball off your opponent's leg. Why it isn't a foul now to intentionally hit someone with the ball, I cannot fathom, but this wonderful rule proposal would render it moot.
The third problem may be the worst of the lot. In game two between the Rockets and Jazz, Shane Battier ran into Deron Williams on a loose ball they were both trying to get to and was called for a foul. In game two of the Bulls-Heat series Antoine Walker ran over Kurt Hinrich on another loose ball and Hinrich inexplicably was assessed his fifth personal. In the same Jazz-Rockets game, Carlos Boozer tried to take a rebound away from Yao Ming from behind and was called for an "over the back" foul which pretty much sealed the game for Houston.
What's the problem? Players hustling to get to loose balls are often penalized for arriving a fraction of a second later than an opponent. The policy of awarding virtual possession to the player who gets there first and penalizing any subsequent contact is illogical. If players followed the strategy that this call implies, they would only go after loose balls they were sure they would be able to get. Do we want to watch a twelve-minute standoff with ten players in a stalemate circle around a ball in the middle of the floor? I don't think so. They've got to be allowed to try to get it.
Contact on loose balls should be liberally allowed, and fouls called only if excessive contact results in a change of possession or other advantage gained for the aggressor. "Advantage gained" is the key, here. If two players go for a rebound, and the one who comes up with it gets bumped a bit, so be it. As long as he retains possession, there's no reason to blow the whistle. Likewise chasing after an errant pass, etc.
Under this interpretation, the Walker-Hinrich play should have been a no call. The Boozer-Yao play is harder to tell, because the whistle blew while they were fighting over the ball on the floor. But I think a no call would be appropriate here, because the contact came when both players were reaching for the ball. This was not a push-him-down-and-jump-over-him "over the back" foul. The Battier-Williams play is more of a mess. Certainly, Battier was trying to get the ball, not to run over Williams. But Williams had already tipped the ball in the direction of his own basket, and if Battier hadn't leveled him, he could have run it down and made a lay-up. It's probably a foul. And yet this is the one that the commentators made the biggest fuss about. Go figure.
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