Flopping in the NBA is not a new issue — Vlade Divac mastered it long ago — but it has become a bigger topic of discussion in the last year. Talk about flopping is seemingly everywhere and suddenly there are people wondering if there is more flopping in the NBA or international soccer.
David Stern does not like that talk. Not one bit. You know how he gets about the NBA’s image. Flopping came up at his annual meeting with the media before Game 1 of the NBA finals and he was clearly frustrated.
“‘Flopping’ almost doesn’t do it justice,” Stern said. “Trickery. Deceit. Designed to cause the game to be decided other than on its merits. We’ll be looking at that.”
By “we” he means his streamlined (read: easier to control and manipulate) competition committee, which is going to start meeting next week. That committee has a couple owners, a couple GMs, players and owners (it used to be the 30 NBA GMs that decided rule changes). Stern said he has seen the agenda for the competition committee and flopping is on it.
Looking at it is one thing, the bigger challenge is how do you address it — if you’re talking about a charge/block situation that is a tough call anyway.
“Instant replay and elimination of tricks that are designed either to fool the ref or, if you don’t fool the ref, to make the fans think that the refs made a bad call by not calling it,” Stern said. “That shouldn’t have a place in our game….
“We don’t like to get into a situation where we tell the officials, ‘This is the rule but don’t call so many.’ If there’s a rule to be changed, then we’ll look at it, and I think there will be a robust discussion about an interpretation or an emphasis about how that should or shouldn’t be called.”
Flopping can already be called as a foul and you can train the referees to look for it more. But the problem remains that it is an interpretation call and guys are looking for an edge. There are going to be struggles enforcing this because flops will still get foul calls and some fouls will get called flops. It is not going to be clean.
But they are going to try to do something. David Stern is tired of the talk.