Heat analyst on NBA Radio today and they were talking about how Tatum always gets calls and gets away with things...
Celtics vs Heat ECF Redux Discussion Thread
- Thread starter DeadlySplitter
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Where was his right arm, though? Answer: on Butler's torso.
Tatum got called for one in the 1Q, I think, where the arms were clean but he got the body. You gotta look at both. It's still a foul to be touching a shooter in the torso when he goes up for a shot.
And therein lies the rub with all of these Jimmy plays. They are all fouls if you send them to replay even though none of them feel like fouls in real time. I hated the one on Rob the most. When you don’t even have any intention of trying to make a shot you should not get rewarded.
You’re allowed incidental contact - obviously that’s a judgment call as to what goes beyond incidental. I had missed Al stepping on Jimmy’s foot. That’s a foul, but it’s before the gather and not three shots. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.
By the time they get to this level, I think refs are all really conditioned to take into account the score and the situation when making close calls. And I think that is actually not a bad thing.
You see it all the time where the ref thinks he has a foul but waits to see if the basket goes before calling it. You would like refs to be certain and call what they see every time, but it just doesn’t really work like that in a fast game with world class athletes. If the ref is 75/25 on contact, it seems to be rough justice for the ref to call the foul if the basket is not made but take a pass if the basket goes.
On the Butler foul, remember that the ref thought that it was a two point attempt. That seems to be important. Not calling a foul where there is one can be as much of an injustice as calling one. If the ref thought he saw a foul and thought it was a two, the worst outcome if he misses the call is OT and the worst outcome if he calls nothing and it turns out there was a clear foul is that he decided the game unfairly.
I think refs do this kind of consequence-of-being-wrong analysis on the fly all the time, maybe unconsciously. I have posted my thoughts about this aspect of replay mostly in the context of football but it applies here too. It can really undermine these kind of rough justice calculations that refs often make and end up tipping the scales. It is worst in soccer. But it really impacts basketball too. Remember when they had these plays where the refs thought a foul was too consequential so they would just call out of bounds off the offending team even though the ball was technically off the hand of the offensive team? Replay ruined that and they had to change the rule after Booker and the Suns got screwed in the playoffs.
You see it all the time where the ref thinks he has a foul but waits to see if the basket goes before calling it. You would like refs to be certain and call what they see every time, but it just doesn’t really work like that in a fast game with world class athletes. If the ref is 75/25 on contact, it seems to be rough justice for the ref to call the foul if the basket is not made but take a pass if the basket goes.
On the Butler foul, remember that the ref thought that it was a two point attempt. That seems to be important. Not calling a foul where there is one can be as much of an injustice as calling one. If the ref thought he saw a foul and thought it was a two, the worst outcome if he misses the call is OT and the worst outcome if he calls nothing and it turns out there was a clear foul is that he decided the game unfairly.
I think refs do this kind of consequence-of-being-wrong analysis on the fly all the time, maybe unconsciously. I have posted my thoughts about this aspect of replay mostly in the context of football but it applies here too. It can really undermine these kind of rough justice calculations that refs often make and end up tipping the scales. It is worst in soccer. But it really impacts basketball too. Remember when they had these plays where the refs thought a foul was too consequential so they would just call out of bounds off the offending team even though the ball was technically off the hand of the offensive team? Replay ruined that and they had to change the rule after Booker and the Suns got screwed in the playoffs.
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Nothing to add, but I think this gets to the heart of the matter.
Edit: to add a little bit, it helps unpack the hunch one clearly gets while watching NBA games, that the refs are often beholden to narratives in one sense of another, consciously or unconsciously, and therefore call the game differently than a basketball-version of MLB robo umps would.
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I mean, I guess. But if you could touch the rim you could alter shots that haven’t been taken yet. If such a violation is not enforced the games get ugly in a hurry.
I don't understand your point. It's not exclusively a moral component, obviously. But grabbing the rim is different from a typical goaltend in ways that arguably reflect upon sportsmanship, hence the added technical foul over and above the goaltending penalty.
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So the double dribble wasn’t ‘proximate’ enough to Al’s foul I guess? Even tho it was 1/2 second earlier and directly impacted Butler’s ability to get in a position to draw Al’s foul. Weird rules
It's not even necessary to reach a sportsmanship angle: grabbing the rim can bend it or get it out of alignment, like in that game earlier this season where they then had a 30+ minute game delay to reset it and get it level. And that was just from a legal but vigorous dunk. That alone is enough difference to justify a different penalty.
Is it absolutely necessary for them to add on an extra tech? No, but there are several valid explanations for it; it's a reasonable choice.
It's not that it wasn't proximate enough. It's not on the list of things they can review on a coach's challenge. There's a list of 9 things that can be reviewed and double dribble isn't on the list.
More than dunking and hanging on the rim? I thought of that and dismissed it for this reason.
I thought the one on Rob was the most obvious foul. He sells it but in the replay he clearly drives in a straight line and Rob cuts him off with the side of his body. Butler does a ridiculous reaction flailing to the side but he doesn't actually initiate anything, he goes in a straight line and hits Rob's torso.
I'm not an expert on basketball rims. Beats me, just seemed like a plausible enough justification for the rule.
Well there is a reason to dunk and hang (so you don’t land on someone coming down). There is zero reason for a defensive player to ever grab the rim.
They don't call a tech on that even if there's no one around. And also, just the act of dunking would seem to impact the rim more violently than what Adebayo did.
And generally, in most technical foul situations there is a sportmanship component.
I get it, it was a clear foul. I had no problem with the call. It was just aesthetically awful and so frustrating to watch in real time because you knew exactly what was happening.
They used to call a tech for unnecessarily hanging on the rim after a dunk. But that seemed to have stopped awhile ago.
I just hope it isn’t Brothers. He is the worst ref in the NBA and is a disaster waiting to happen.
Yep. Maybe the tech for a defensive player grabbing the rim is a relic left over from a time they were more concerned about such things. That's a possibility. Obviously you don't hand out techs for dunks, but for every other kind of contact with the rim, maybe at one time this was cause for concern.
He does the arm wave at the official. I think it was for that. They WILL call a technical if you do a pullup on the rim instead of just hanging.
I think it is important to understand that there were two separate things called on the play. First, basket interference. Second, grasping the ring not on a dunk attempt. You can have one without the other. You can grasp the ring but if the other conditions of basket interference are not met it is just a technical and not an award of two or three points. You can also obviously have BI or goaltending without grabbing the rim. Here you had both so they called both.
I think the reason grasping the rim is a technical is that you are not supposed to be able to use equipment to better your position.
Yeah they instituted that at first as a matter of sportsmanship, where any hanging at all was deemed to be showing the opponents up. After a few years, they loosened the guidelines so that only explicitly taunting the other team while hanging on the rim - like doing chin-ups - would get a tech. So you now have to be actively a dick to get a T from hanging on the rim. Feels like a good balance.
If you can grab the rim as a defensive player.. what’s to stop you from hanging on the rim with one hand and block the shot? Or to snap back the rim as the ball is in the air? Or to shake the rim so that a close shot rims out? There are a lot of reasons why messing with the hoop as a defensive player shouldn’t be allowed and is worthy of a tech.
I may have missed this elsewhere, but keep an eye on Tatum on the two right split screens. He didn’t see the ball go in. He walks back to the bench dejected and then somebody tells him.
Sure. Those are all good sportsmanship reasons for it to be a tech above and beyond simply calling it a goaltend. And one might imagine a situation in which a shot isn't taken but the defensive player somehow uses it to an advantage. How do you impose a penalty in the absence of a shot or foul? (Like dissuading shots in the way you allude to.) It would have to be a tech as a practical matter, as DennyDoyle'sBoil post implicitly points out.
Precisely! Tatum really needs to watch players like Jimmy Butler and master how they draw fouls. If Tatum consistently got the kind of whistle Butler does, he would be unstoppable
Yeah. Imagine an offensive player grabs the rim with his left hand and then jams with his right. It would be offensive BI and a T. This is the defensive equivalent. In one case wipe out the basket and count the T and in the other award the basket and award the T.
If someone buys into the whole "the NBA assigns certain refs, not to guarantee an outcome, but to maybe nudge certain ones along" then the refs we get for Game 7 should have a slight home team bias, or slight "pro-Boston" bias, etc. The NBA doesn't want Miami vs. Denver in the Finals, not to mention the extra attention a team coming back from 3-0 would give.
How does he not get his ass kicked though? He was being made fun of and filmed by a bunch of Heat fans.. would be funny to see some of those videos
More or less. The post you quoted was just me exploring an alternate perspective. The way people talked about the particular play was why the double penalty? Well, grabbing the rim is a tech. Touching the rim while the shot is in the air is a goaltend. Why the double penalty? It's because there are two separate infractions as DennyDoyle'sBoil points out. So why is grabbing the rim a tech? Maybe it's partly poor sportsmanship, maybe it's partly protecting equipment from unnecessary handling, and almost definitely because there may be no other practical way to punish the act (no shot or foul).
I remember seeing a player (I think it was Scottie Pippen?) go up for a dunk but didn't dunk cleanly, so the ball hit the rim, popped up, and dropped through. In the meantime, he hung on the rim, enough so that the rim moved. They counted the basket, if I remember right. Should they have?
I don't think so by rule.. I feel like I've seen that in a number of other scenarios where the shot was ruled no good.. but perhaps in those other scenarios the player touched the ball again? I think generally those kinds of shots don't count though... because the player hanging on the rim theoretically changes the location of the rim.
I think the key possible question would be.. what happens if Bam misses the ball? He didn't.. but if he had his other hand being on the rim could possibly have changed the rim location. If I had to guess grabbing the rim is an automatic type foul/tech regardless of whatever happens on the play.
Thanks for pointing that out, I definitely missed it. This makes sense - in the immediate aftermath I did notice that he seemed almost dazed or high, and it's because for a few seconds he legitimately thought the game was over (unlike the rest of the world that thought it was over for approximately .5 seconds), and had already hit bottom. Realizing that they might still be alive, followed by him seeing the replay a few seconds later must have been like a shot of adrenaline to the heart.
Wow, that's wild. He definitely thought the season was over for awhile there.
Not sure, but at least in those videos, he's not an asshole, he just believes they can win. And when they do he doesn't turn around and flip them all off or do the D-Lowe crotch chop, he just celebrates.
He is also close to the court, where fans tend to pay big bucks as season ticket holders. Those Heat fans tend to be of the arrive late, leave early variety, and may not be as emotionally invested as some in the upper decks.
