Trickery, Shenanigans and Officiating, with Monty McCutchen | The Crossover

NBA’s head of officiating, Monty McCutchen breaks down the new rules for the upcoming season

Mark Humphrey/AP

On the Friday edition, Howard Beck welcomes the NBA’s head of officiating, Monty McCutchen, to discuss all the rules tweaks for the 2021–22 season. The biggest change? A crackdown on offensive players drawing cheap fouls—with leg kicks, sideways leaps and other shenanigans.

The following transcript is an excerpt from the Open Floor podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.

Howard Beck: The new NBA season is nearly upon us folks. And a new season, of course, means some new rules or interpretations or various tweaks and adjustments and points of emphasis for the game referees. The biggest one this season, a crackdown on offensive players drawing fouls in various cheap and nefarious ways. You know, the leg kicks and the side leg kicks and the sideways leaps and the forward leaps and the back flips and all these other forms of trickery and shenanigans and dark magic. Refs are being instructed and trained this season to reign-in that stuff. They've heard all the complaints from other players and coaches and you the fans, who hate a lot of this—unless one of those guys happens to be your favorite player. Some of those plays are going to be offensive fouls now and some will just be non calls. So what's what? What's a foul? What's a non-call? How do they decide? Here to explain it all today, the ever gracious head of officiating for the NBA, Monty McCutchen. 

Monty of course, one of the NBA's best refs throughout his own career, now serves as, Senior Vice President and Head of Referee Development and Training ... That's a long title. Monty is always great in explaining this stuff point by point. So we discussed the crack down on the foul drawing shenanigans. Also the likely change in replay rules on out of bounds plays for the last two minutes. All reports indicate that coaches challenges will be able to review out of bounds plays for the last two minutes. But it will no longer be one of those automatic triggers or something generated by the referees. A few other points that we'll get into also about refereeing the season; for that discussion about offensive fouls, you can watch alone. There are four videos from last season that illustrate the new emphasis on these offensive fouls and which I will reference in our conversation. Those plays are on the NBA's Twitter feed, @NBAofficial. So go there first folks. Go to Twitter @NBAofficial. They were posted on August 8th, but they're very close to the top of the feed, go check that out. You can follow along and see what Monty and I are talking about. 

Listen to Open Floor: SI's NBA Show
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | iHeart

Find recent episodes on SI.com. Join the Open Floor Globe fan community on Slack.