Something Foul

It’s the perfect time for me to write this. I’m biased, like everybody who cares about sports, and my particular bias happens to be in favor of Boston teams. Tonight, I saw the Boston Celtics lose 94-75 to the Detroit Pistons, and of Boston’s 75 points, 32 came in the form of free throws (out of 39 attempts).

I say that this is the perfect time to write this because my main point is going to be, if you read down a paragraph, that 39 free throws is far too many, and tonight, the foul calls went decisively in favor of the Celtics (Detroit was 20 of 26 from the stripe). If anything, my inner Boston bias should have inspired me to post a 14-line Shakespearean sonnet dedicated to Dan Crawford and his officiating crew. But I can’t do that; this was the least fun-to-watch basketball game I’ve seen in a while, and not just because my team lost.

There need to be fewer foul calls in the NBA. My team scored almost half its points because its opponent broke the rules, and watching people break the rules isn’t fun. If a football team gained half of its total yards on penalties, or if a hockey team spent more than half the game in the penalty box, or if a baseball team gained more than half of its total bases on balks and catcher’s interference, no one would be happy. So why shouldn’t I be fed up when it happens in basketball?

Reducing the number of foul calls, as far as I can see it, can be basically done in two ways: reduce the number of fouls, or reduce the number of calls. The latter would entail relaxing the rules a little bit, raising the bar for the amount of contact that is required to blow the whistle. This is the ideal solution, I think, but it’s also an idealistic solution. There are tons of phantom fouls (and flopping, if I ever get around to writing about it, merits a 2,500-word diatribe, but it’s only getting a parenthetical mention here), but there are also tons of legitimate fouls. I would love to say that relaxing the standards would get rid of the phantom calls and keep the real ones, but I just don’t think it would work that way. The end result, I suspect, would be that phantom and real calls would decrease just about equally, and ultimately I think that’s too unfair to offensive players.

The other solution is not to change the ways that players’ behavior is regulated, but to change players’ behavior. The best way that I can see to do this would be to reduce the number of personals required to foul out from six to five. With less leeway, players would be forced to play less physical defense, and you’d see more baskets and fewer free throws.

There are obvious objections to this proposal, the most noteworthy being: “but you’re reducing the ability of players to play defense!” Well, yes, that’s exactly what I think should happen. Is that so bad? Imagine the NBA had no foul limit whatsoever, and someone suggested a six-foul penalty. The result would be the same, and the only reason we don’t think the six-foul limit is crazy is because it’s always been there. As a bonus, this plan would increase scoring, and even though I’m in the minority in that I’d rather watch great defense, this plan seems like it would give the people what they want.

Another, related complaint is that the six-foul limit is a part of basketball and you can’t just change it. But this argument is completely counter to the very thing that makes sports so great: they’re completely arbitrary. We create a series of rules that we think will result in interesting outcomes, and if the outcome isn’t interesting, we change the rules until it is. We decided that it would be fun to see a guy lob an oblong ball in a perfect spiral sixty yards downfield for a touchdown, so we added the pass interference rule so the receiver doesn’t get decked at the line of scrimmage. There’s no inherent reason the defense shouldn’t be able to do that, we just don’t want to see it, so we tell them not to.

Well, I don’t want to watch Paul Pierce throw himself into three Pistons in the paint in the hope of hearing a whistle, and I want to see that changed. Maybe I’m idealistic, but I’d like to see success in sports determined by how well you play. And when hoping that your opponent will break the rules, or trying to get them to, becomes a legitimate strategy for winning, it gets less fun for me. So let’s change it. Because we definitely can.