Raptors prepare for NBA’S stiff new penalties for flopping
Embry recalls frontier justice of the old days
HALIFAX— The NBA has decided to hit serial floppers where it hurts the most — in the wallet — but in a far simpler time, there were other avenues available to make sure those that would embellish wouldn’t do it too often.
And maybe if there had been more guys like Wayne Embry around in the last decade or so, the blight that flopping has become would never have reached this point.
The NBA decided this week to levy heavy financial penalties on the worst offenders — a move that immediately resulted in the players association launching a lawsuit because the decision was arbitrary and not collectively bargained. Its penalties, ranging from a warning to a fine of $30,000 or more, may well stop the problem. Embry? He had a better idea. “You’d fall on them,” the Raptors adviser and one of game’s the most respected elder statesmen said here Thursday when asked how players in his day would deal with floppers.
Embry — a man of substantial size also known as The Wall (and not because he was from Berlin) — wasn’t joking.
“K.C. Jones, when we’d play the Celtics, he would flop,” Embry said. “When I’d set a pick on him and roll, he’d grab my shirt or he would just fall down and I got tired of it.
“I said, OK . . . I got my fifth foul or whatever it was, an offensive foul, so I just fell on him and when I got up I just put my elbow right on his neck. And I got up and I said, ‘That’s for flopping.’ He learned.”
That kind of justice can’t be meted out these days, the NBA frowns upon players trying to bury each other in the hardwood with their elbows.
But flopping — flailing arms, anguished screams, theatrical collapses to the floor after the most innocent contact — has become such a hot-button issue the league took unprecedented moves to curtail it.
The decision was welcomed by virtually all players and coaches, although many expect the rules to relax after an initial flurry of compliance.
“Everybody flops in this league,” said Raptors guard John Lucas III. “Bigs flop, guards definitely flop. Any day anyone grabs my jersey, I’ll sell it like they grabbed my spine out of my back.” There is a nuanced difference between “selling” a call and falling as if a player had been struck by a Taser rather slightly jostled. Because it’s turned out to be such a difficult call for officials to make at full speed in real time, the league will look at video before levying penalties. It won’t allow referees to correct their calls in games, though. “I don’t know if fines are the answer; maybe just put a point of emphasis on it with the refs is an answer,” said Raptors centre Aaron Gray. “It’s a tough play to call, especially live. Looking at the review the next morning makes a lot of sense. “I think what they’ll find is that it’ll be hard to review it on tape as well. Just what angle, how can you determine how much force. And a lot of the NBA is being able to draw a foul. The stars do it. That’s why they get to the line 10 to 12 times a game.” Raptors coach Dwane Casey doesn’t mind his players hitting or getting hit, but he wants no embellishment or fakery. “I’ve never coached a player to get over there and act like you got hit. Get there, get position, take the blow, take the hit and take the charge. It’s a man’s play, this is a man’s league and that’s what I try to sell more than anything.”