McHale fails to see flagrancy in today’s fouls
SAN FRANCISCO — Progress might be for the better, and change is inevitable, but old school did have its merits. If nothing else, it taught lessons.
Rockets coach Kevin McHale has in many ways changed with the times, as every dozen or so 3-pointers his team launches remind. But even with the NBA ruling that center Dwight Howard did not go too far over the line with his smack on Golden State’s Andrew Bogut in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, McHale remains partial to 1980s-style NBA justice.
“If a guy held you, the referee says, ‘If you don’t want to get hit, don’t hold him,’ ” McHale said. “So you blasted him in the head, and the referee says, ‘There was a reason. You held him and got blasted in the head.’
“You’d look at the guy and say, ‘If you hold me, I’m going to hit you in the head.’ And then he quit holding you, and you quit hitting him in the head.”
Today’s NBA would rather players not hit one another. But on Tuesday, NBA president of basketball operations Rod Thorn ruled that when Howard hit Bogut in the head, he was trying to “extricate” himself from a hold rather than retaliate or teach a lesson.
After a video review, Howard received a flagrant foul, category 1. Asked if the NBA overreacts to the physical play, McHale looked at it another way.
“What physical play?” McHale said. “I missed the physical play, so I don’t know what they’re overreacting to.”
Flagrant-foul rules that award free throws and possession of the ball began in the 1990-91 season. The points system, which leads to suspensions based on the number of flagrant fouls a player commits, began in 1993-94.
“When I played, how they policed you was more about your reputation,” said Rockets assistant coach Greg Buckner, who played from 1999 to 2009. “If you were known to be a little dirty and to get under guys’ skin … they leaned toward that guy (who retaliates). They’d know how Bogut is.
“Now, with all the cameras and all the replay, they want to keep the game clean. No dirty play. It’s hard to police it on the court. It’s hard as a player to do what you need to do. You can get suspended. You can get fined.”
Buckner, a physical and tenacious defender, admitted he was more likely to be Bogut than Howard in most exchanges, but he said he preferred when players policed themselves more.
“Times have changed, but is it better? No, I don’t think it’s better,” Buckner said. “Basketball is a physical sport. Everyone thinks football is physical, but basketball is physical, too. Maybe not as violent, but physical.
“There’s going to be some touching, some grabbing, some pushing and some elbowing. That’s part of basketball. That’s a little bit of why people play: because they enjoy that physicality. Now they don’t want that. They want a lot of scoring. They don’t want that physicality. But you have to adjust to the times, understand what the rules are, and play by the rules.”
For Howard, that meant knowing he had reached the limit of infractions the NBA would allow without a suspension. The flagrant foul Monday was his third of the postseason. With another, he would automatically be suspended for a game.
As it turned out, had Game 6 been necessary, Howard would have been suspended anyway. In Wednesday’s 104-90 Game 5 loss that ended the series, Howard picked up his seventh technical foul of the postseason, another cause for automatic suspension. That rule also brought objections from McHale.
“I don’t know who came up with those rules, but you should just decide how many flagrants or how many technicals are acceptable per series — one, two, three, nine, I don’t know — and then every series starts off with zero,” McHale said. “You have that many in the first series, and you have that many in the Finals.”
The idea of a per-round limit for technical and flagrant fouls has come up. It has not reached the NBA competition committee for consideration, but McHale would seem more likely to win that battle than his call for a return to 1980s-style frontier justice.