As tension rises, players and coaches are taking it out on the officials. The NBA releases daily two-minute reports assessing calls late in close games. The referees’ union keeps complaining about that practice.
It all boiled over to a rare show of the league publicly calling a National Basketball Referees Association claim “not accurate:"
A fundamental flaw with the L2M leads to this sort of media reaction. The 5-second violation should not have been an INC - our stopwatch has it within a couple tenths of a second. To expect a human to be as exact as a stopwatch is unreasonable. The referee followed protocol. https://t.co/EVAFKAJyfy
— NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs) March 15, 2018
Our issues are not with the media, but with the L2M. It is a flawed process where analysts without officiating experience are using different protocols to evaluate plays than the referees are taught. It breeds inconsistency and frustration for fans, teams, and referees. https://t.co/blAJ2bvWbe
— NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs) March 15, 2018
This is not accurate; all calls in L2Ms are evaluated by reviewers trained to rate plays the way officials are instructed to call them; their decisions are approved by ref ops senior staff (former officials) and senior b-ball ops personnel, all with many years of NBA experience https://t.co/KVDXrfDBrm
— NBA Official (@NBAOfficial) March 16, 2018
If the reviewers were trained as referees are trained, they would not have called this an INC. This is a textbook execution of what we are trained to do. We're talking about fractions of a second, undetectable without technology. Watch the visible count: https://t.co/WUDps5DjA9 https://t.co/som0PtI0mi
— NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs) March 16, 2018
The NBRA is doing its members no favors with all these attempts to defend the process behind incorrect calls. People want correct calls and calls that favor their team. There’s nothing referees can do about the latter. They should focus on the former.
The inbound took longer than five seconds. It should have been a violation. The end.
Want to curry favor? Advocate for the NBA adopting the technology necessary to get these calls right. There’s no reason, in the year 2018, five-second calls should be determined by a referee tracking time with arm waves while watching for other calls. Nobody expects refs to count out the shot clock. Other timed calls – including three-second violations – should be handled with digital timers.
Instead, the referees union picks these lame public fights. The league’s response only increases the off-putting pettiness all around.
Nobody wants to root for referees. This is not going to turn mass opinion.
