NBA Says Referee Errors Are Down Amid Growing Complaints From Coaches and Players
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On Wednesday, less than an hour after being ejected from a game his team was trailing, Los Angeles Clippers coach Tyronn Lue raced out of the locker room to celebrate a come-from-behind win. As he exited, he had a few more choice words for the referees who sent him there.
âWhere the refs at now?â Lue shouted. âCheating ass, thatâs all theyâve been doing.â
Lueâs outburstâvideo of which quickly went viralâwas the latest pointed criticism of NBA officiating. It also earned him a $35,000 fine, the league announced Friday. Last month, Toronto Raptors coach Darko RajakoviÄ, unhappy about a wide free throw disparity between the Raptors and Los Angeles Lakers, unleashed a fiery, two-minute rant toward the referees. Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown brought a laptop to a postgame news conference to illustrate a blown call. Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards called the officiating âterribleâ after a win.
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Monty McCutchen, the NBAâs Senior Vice President of Referee Development and Training, acknowledged in an interview with Sports Illustrated that some of the criticism has been sharper. âI think thatâs true, in general,â McCutchen says. But he notes that scrutiny of refereeing has heightened across all sports. And that not all of the critiques are accurate.
âI think one of the important factors in leadership is trying to delineate between the criticism that has true merit and what is part of a perception issue,â McCutchen says. âYou canât attack the things you need to attack if youâre not good at separating out whatâs just perception and narrative and what is actually factual.â
âErrors are down. ⊠About an error per game,â he says, citing the NBAâs independent grading group (the NBA does not share referee data). Free throw attempts are down slightly. Fouls, too. Scoring has ticked up this season, but McCutchen insists thatâs more about the evolution of the game than the way it is being officiated.
âItâs how teams are playing,â McCutchen says. âTheyâre playing very efficiently, theyâre playing smart basketball. Through the coaching and the analytic information, theyâve become much more in tuned to what is good basketball.â
The most oft-criticized whistles are judgment calls. How referees call âverticality,â a defense Roy Hibbert made famous more than a decade ago, has drawn questions, as have âpathway plays,â where a referee must decide if a defender is in a legal position when there is contact.
âMerely having your hands up does not turn the play into a verticality play,â McCutchen says. âA verticality play is about getting to a spot first and then having the rights vertically to that space. Itâs often then a positional play, meaning you get to a spot first and then you await the offensive player coming to you and you have vertical rights. They can be jumping or they can be standing still. Often though, what we see misconstrued as a verticality play is someone running alongside someone with their hands up. Thatâs not it.â
Contact, McCutchen says, does not mean a foul. Edwardsâs frustration came after getting no whistle on a late drive against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Replay appeared to show Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hitting Edwardsâs arm as he went to the rim. In the NBAâs Last Two Minute Reportâa public evaluation of the calls made in the final two minutes of every gameâthe contact was ruled âmarginalâ and the non-call correct.
Anthony Edwards monster crunch-time driving dunk, wow pic.twitter.com/BCMqquiXEn
â Timberwolves Clips (@WolvesClips) January 30, 2024
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â Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 30, 2024
McCutchen stands by that decision. âBasketball is a contact sport,â McCutchen says. âThe difference is, of course, the difference between legal and illegal contact.â When assessing contact, referees use four criteria: speed, quickness, rhythm and balance, or SQRB. When deciding whether to blow the whistle, referees evaluate whether the SQRB is affected. In the case of Edwards, McCutchen says, it wasnât.
âIf Anthony was going up with two hands for a layup and we see some contact, but thereâs no hitch, thereâs no rhythm, you just power on through, we think that thatâs the appropriate balance,â McCutchen says. âWe do have defensive players who are inclined to contest at the rim, which we know is great basketball.â
For more than two decades, the NBA has tweaked its rules to make the game more free-flowing. It took out hand checking and curbed the physicality. Itâs also adapted to eliminate some of the ways offensive players manipulate it. Making the swim move, where a player creates contact by going into a shooting motion while under the arms of a defender, no longer results in free throws. Offensive players jumping into defenders is no longer a defensive foul.
McCutchen says he is open to even more changes. âSome of these plays where someone has sealed the offensive player appropriately and we give in to the offensive playerâs desire to create that impression of a foul, weâre working on that,â McCutchen says. As the game evolves, he says, so should the way it is refereed.
âWhat do we want with this new evolution of the game?â McCutchen asks. âI think thatâs some of the criticism weâre seeing is that the question has come up, then are the current rules serving the game in the proper way? Thatâs the reason we have a competition committee so that governors, players, coaches, general managers and the league office can get into viable, authentic discussion about what are the best rules to serve the game that has evolved to this point today, in 2024. Weâre actively in those discussions.â
Beyond how the game is called, interactions with players and coaches have come under scrutiny. Before getting ejected Wednesday, Lue had several tense exchanges with James Williams, a veteran referee. âJames deserves to be suspended for how he talked to Tyronn,â said a source who overheard the discussions. Leaving the locker room, Lue yelled, âWhere James at? I wanna kiss him in the mouth.â
In November, Chris Paul and referee Scott Foster continued an ongoing feud when Foster ejected Paul from a game against the Phoenix Suns. Paul said the dispute was personal, referencing a situation he says occurred between Foster and his son. In December, NBA commissioner Adam Silver weighed in, saying, âwhatever the bad blood is between you two, you donât have to be friends, but you both have to go out and do your jobs.â
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Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers believes some of the conflict stems from the influx of new referees.
âItâs an extremely hard game to officiate, our league,â Rivers says. âAnd the second part of that is we have a turnover of a lot of veteran officials leaving over the last couple years. We have a lot of young officials. Some of the young officials, to me, are doing their best to show that they are capable and by doing that there are techs. Itâs definitely something that a lot of people in the coaching industry are talking about.â
McCutchen says he has no issues with how referees conduct themselves, including Foster. He says he is comfortable with Foster, who consistently grades out as one of the NBAâs top officials, officiating games Paul plays in. If he wasnât, Foster wouldnât just be off Paulâs games. He would be off the job.
âIf any referee, Scott or any other referee on our staff canât be trusted to referee a single player or a single team, that wouldnât be cause to not have them referee that single player or that team,â McCutchen says. âThat would be cause for firing someone. If someone is not capable of integrity, which Scott most certainly is, but if someone we find out canât be trusted in their integrity with one player, then they canât be trusted to serve this league.
âAnd thatâs indicative of any referee on our staff. Anyone that I am working with in this role that I canât trust to put on any game or any player, then they donât need to be on the staff because that is at the heart of integrity. Thatâs the thing about integrity. You can never have 94% integrity. Once you sell it the first time, integrity and its totality is gone. And so we make sure that weâre really on top of all the analytical data that would suggest bias.â
There is always, McCutchen says, room for improvement.
âReferees serve the game,â McCutchen says. âThe game is going to evolve and referees have to keep up with that evolution.â