Court marshals
The player-official struggle raged on with Westbrook’s ejection Monday night.
You can call Carmelo Anthony a clairvoyant. Or maybe the NBA’s percolating player vs. official power struggle finally boiled over.
A week prior, Anthony reflected on a time when players and officials had dialogue. Not that it’s completely gone in 2018, but when Anthony entered the league in 2003, the
game was slower, the rules were different, the relationships were greater.
“The game’s changed a lot since I’ve come in 15 years ago,” Anthony said. “Whether it was good, whether it was bad, there was always that point where they would let you get a little steam off, then come to you and say ‘OK, that’s enough, let’s move on.’
“Now, the triggers are too quick. You look at somebody wrong, you get a technical foul. Say one wrong thing, you get a technical foul.”
So, on Monday, when Russell Westbrook was served with two technical fouls in a span of seconds, and Thunder coach Billy Donovan with another tech for simply asking about Westbrook’s ejection, Anthony looked like a basketball Nostradamus.
In actuality, the league has been primed for a player/official fallout for some time, with fault falling neither on the AllStars or the referees.
In 2010, the NBA implemented increased fines on technical fouls and began cracking down on players who made overt gestures, contested calls or didn’t show respect for the game. The league claimed the policy was put in place because its research showed fans thought players complained too much.
The players’ union claimed players weren’t consulted about the change.
“We have not seen any increase in the level of ‘complaining’ to the officials and we believe that players as a whole have demonstrated appropriate behavior toward the officials,” former players union president Billy Hunter said in 2010. “Worse yet, to the extent the harsher treatment from the referees leads to a stifling of the players’ passion and exuberance for their work, we fear these changes may actually harm our product.”
The changes haven’t harmed the game itself. In those eight seasons since the move, ratings are up, franchise values have ballooned into the billions, and young talent abides from Philadelphia to Oakland.
But the first half of the 2017-18 season has had wild, accusatory nights — from Toronto’s DeMar DeRozan picking up a $15,000 fine for his comments about the Raptors 127-125 loss to Golden State on Saturday — “It’s frustrating being out there feeling like you’re playing five-on-eight. Some of them calls was terrible. Period.” — to Golden State’s Draymond Green getting fined $25,000 for telling The Athletic that officials were “ruining the game” and that the NBA should “get a new crop.”
No night was wilder than a Martin Luther King Jr. Day slate in which five players were ejected from games, including Westbrook. While USA Today cited a decrease in technicals from 781 last season to 760 this season at the same point, the lingering discontent warrants wondering where the player-official relationship
stands and how can it be improved.
It’s a relationship believed to be so fractured that player representatives from the National Basketball Players Association and select officials will meet during All-Star weekend in Los Angeles in February to talk it out.
ESPN officiating analyst Steve Javie worked as an NBA official for 25 seasons before retiring in 2011. He likes the idea of the players and officials meeting, but thinks both sides have to be honest with each other.
“The contention has been there since the first jump ball,” Javie told The
Oklahoman via phone call Tuesday. “For some reason, players and coaches think they have a vendetta against them.
“The players get upset with the officials, but if you think about it, the league makes the rules up. What the referees have to do is uphold that. Some guys uphold it different, some don’t uphold it at all.”
That’s where relationships come into play. According to officials rosters provided by the NBA, since the 2012-13 season, the league has promoted 17 non-staff officials to full-time positions. In that span, some of the league’s most experienced officials — Bennett Savatore, Joey Crawford, Monty McCutchen, Danny Crawford, Dick Bavetta — have either retired or been elevated into the league office.
“Players got to know the officials they could have conversation with,” Javie said of the continuity of officials. “With players and officials, everyone has a different personality.
Some officials had a shorter fuse, like I did. It’s a combination of learning each other’s personalities.”
“That goes back to what I was saying about years ago,” Anthony said. “That was a communication, that was a dialogue. If an official gets it wrong, they’d come back to you and say ‘I messed up. I got it wrong.’ Now, that level of communication is not there.”
That communication was there Monday when Donovan said an official apologized for giving him a technical foul, but it’s often lacking between the NBA and its employees.
Javie isn’t a fan of the NBA’s Last Two Minute reports — a system implemented under the notion of providing transparency. If a game is within three points during the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, its calls in the final two minutes are charted and graded either “incorrect” or “correct,” then the report is posted online.
Javie questions the benefits of putting officials under such scrutiny with little benefit.
“If someone is judging you incorrectly, this affects your rating, this goes into your file,” Javie said. “In my conversations, it kind of bothers them. On certain plays they definitely disagree with whoever makes that decision (to deem a call incorrect on the L2M report).”
Officials feel they’re getting overly scrutinized. Players feel there’s no dialogue. The pressure points have collided on the court with the league outside the wreckage.