NBA: Expanded Replay Not Viable For Basketball

The NBA is putting a lot of added scrutiny on itself with its Last Two Minute Reports on officiating in close games, but even after the debacle in San Antonio earlier this week, expanding replay won’t work.

The state of officiating in the NBA found its way back into the national crosshairs after a ridiculous sequence of events at the end of Monday’s Western Conference semifinals game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs.

The final seconds were marked by a defensive player stepping across the sideline while an opponent was attempting an inbounds pass, the inbounding player throwing a forearm into that player’s chest and some wild action on the court that would have been 15-yard pass interference penalties in another sport.

On Tuesday, the NBA released its official Last Two Minute Report of the game, admitting that five calls were missed in the final sequence of Game 2 between the Thunder and Spurs.

At the macro level, the NBA has two key perception issues and they can be directly at odds.

NBA officiating is perceived as, at best, questionable.
The last two minutes are perceived as the only part of an NBA game that really matters.

The first perception has been around for a long time and is a movement that gained strength after obvious abnormalities occurred in Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Sacramento Kings and the Los Angeles Lakers.

This was further locked into the national psyche when veteran NBA official Tim Donaghy pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges related to influencing the outcome of games he worked to benefit gamblers.

Throw in the presence of veteran referees such as Dick Bavetta and Joey Crawford, now both retired, who appeared at times to behave as if fans spent money on tickets to see them blow whistles and eject players and you have a serious image issue.

So the NBA has gone for a level of transparency with its so-called for Twitter purposes #L2M reports.

But here’s the twofold problem with those reports. First, nothing can actually be done to correct the officiating mistakes, so the report turns out to be a much-publicized version of Steve Erkel intoning, “Did I do that?”

Secondly, it reinforces the assumption that only the final 120 seconds of an NBA game actually matter.

Of the four major North American sports, the NBA uses video review the least and there have been some calls, from fans in particular, to change that, particularly in the wake of the San Antonio insanity.

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Basketball, however, is a game of movement and flow. Nothing detracts from that movement and flow more than having two teams huddled near their bench while the people in the gray shirts huddle around a monitor at the scorer’s table.

Particularly at a time when the NBA is seriously considering rules changes that would let bad free throw shooters off the hook because games grind to a virtual halt as DeAndre Jordan, Andre Drummond and Dwight Howard parade to the foul line via the Hack-A-Dwight, Hack-A-Jordan and Bang-A-Drum strategies, it seems counter-intuitive—at best—to add more review delays to the game.

For years, I was an advocate for expanding video review in Major League Baseball, arguing that taking a few seconds to watch a video had to be quicker than watching 60-year-old men hobble from one side of the diamond to the other to scream at umpires.

Based on a couple of years’ worth of evidence in MLB, I was wrong.

The NFL has had video review back for several years now and there is nothing quite like the excitement of seeing a guy in a striped shirt peering at a monitor under a hood.

The problem isn’t with the technology so much as it is with the human element. On paper, the review process in every sport reads like something that shouldn’t take more than 45-60 seconds.

In practice, entire civilizations could seemingly rise and fall in the time it takes replay officials to make a decision.

The stakes are high at playoff time and at the speed things move in the NBA, split-second decisions can affect entire series.

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But more video review isn’t a viable solution. Instead, it would just muddy the waters even more.