NBA Refs' Quest to Eliminate Non-Basketball Moves Worked Better Than You Think
How the NBA and its referees identified a problem and set about fixing it during the 2021-22 season.
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Anyone who paid attention to the NBA over the last few years likely noticed an uptick in shenanigans on the offensive end of the floor.
Players like James Harden, Trae Young and other foul-baiting maestros were working the system. And they were doing so with "non-basketball moves" several times a game.
It became so bad that the league office stepped in prior to 2021-22 with rule changes designed to reduce the frequency of those non-basketball moves. And there was enough public interest that it took to Twitter (in the form of a thread) to explain.
"Beginning with Summer Leagues and effective for the 2021-22 season, game officials will enforce the playing rules in a manner that reduces the incentive for offensive players to use non-basketball moves to draw fouls.
"Overt, non-basketball moves used by offensive players to initiate contact with defenders will include when:
The shooter launches or leans into a defender at an abnormal angle
The offensive player abruptly veers off his path (sideways or backwards) into a defender
The shooter kicks his leg (up or to the side) at an abnormal angle
The offensive player’s off-arm hooks the defender (often in the process of attempting a shot in a non-basketball manner)"
The league then provided video examples of each of the above, and you've likely seen all of them used by plenty of players over the years.
The implementation of this new "point of education" hasn't been entirely smooth sailing, though. In the early part of the season, the "non-basketball moves" were seemingly curtailed, but physicality in other areas of the game was up. Addressing that led to a wild midseason swing in foul calls, according to Thinking Basketball's Ben Taylor.
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"It’s kind of what they always do," a former team executive told me. "They emphasize it early and give up later in the year. This is par for the course with these points of education, though. Remember the year they gave techs for touching the ball after a made basket? They stopped calling that after three weeks too."
During the postseason, when an increased focus on the whistle is an annual tradition, at least one team was up in arms.
"That wasn't a quality playoff basketball game, and I think officiating played a role in that," Milwaukee Bucks general manager John Horst told The Athletic's Eric Nehm regarding one of his team's 2022 playoff wins. "When you start looking at the numbers, it's just, it's pretty outrageous."
The Boston Celtics lost that contest, but they shot 34 free throws, which doubled Milwaukee's 17 attempts. The discrepancy even drew the cautious ire of Giannis Antetokounmpo.
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Expecting perfection from the officials (in the application of a point of education or in general) is unrealistic. Horst himself acknowledged the difficulty of their job.
"I mean this sincerely: I do respect that, at the end of the day, it is a hard job, right?" Horst said. "I couldn't do their job. You couldn't do their job. Officiating is hard, just like playing is hard and coaching is hard, and I think we all have a standard of trying to get better and improve."
While reasonable (and unreasonable) gripes will always persist (even Boston had a fair complaint regarding a late Game 3 foul on Marcus Smart that was deemed to be on the floor rather than in the act of shooting), that improvement Horst is after is happening.
At various times during the playoffs, we saw vivid examples of the rule changes above in action.
Halfway through the third quarter of Game 6 between the eventual champion Golden State Warriors and the Memphis Grizzlies, Tyus Jones tried the Chris Paul special by veering off in the middle of a transition possession and hitting Andrew Wiggins. The crowd erupted when an offensive foul was called.
In Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals, Jayson Tatum was called for the offensive foul when he launched himself sideways and into a closing Duncan Robinson.
Both of those calls came after months of honing, though. There were certainly growing pains in the beginning of the season.
"I think one of the things that we saw early on, though, was that we did really well [on the non-basketball moves], but we allowed some of the other areas of gains that we had had in previous years, in November, to slip a little," Senior Vice President, Head of Referee Development & Training Monty McCutchen told me. "So, the freedom of movement. The wraps that we had called for several years. I think our staff got really concentrated, and we saw a little uptick in the physicality. Not because of necessarily the non-basketball moves, but in some other areas."
Evan Wasch, the NBA's executive vice president of strategy and analytics, told me that all fouls called per game were down approximately five percent in that early portion of the season. And teams were noticing.
"Teams were really bitching," a Western Conference general manager told me. "We were just getting mauled going to the paint early in the season."
To that point, Trae, who'd averaged 9.0 free-throw attempts per game in 2019-20 and 2020-21, was down to 5.7 in October and November of 2021-22 . Harden, long notorious for his career average of 8.7 freebies per game, averaged fewer than five over his first 12 contests of that season.
Those trends didn't last, though, thanks in part to, as McCutchen described it, "communication."
"One of the things that I think is probably not recognized enough is the constant flow of information or communication between our stakeholders, the teams, and us as a department, is really desired by us," McCutchen said. "I don't view that as complaints. If they're seeing something in real time that I can improve the game through our service to the game, I want to know that."
The cooperation between the league and its teams led to a reemphasis on freedom of movement. According to Wasch, they were missing one to one and a half calls per game on that front, but they never tweaked 2021-22's emphasis.
An Eastern Conference general manager told me, "They seem to be calling [the point of education] the same all year to me."
So, a mid-season increase in foul calls doesn't represent an about-face from the league or an abandonment of the point of education by the refs.
In fact, when you look at season-long numbers, the officials called roughly the same amount of shooting fouls that they do every year.
2017-18: 9.55 shooting fouls per team per 100 possessions
2018-19: 9.70
2019-20: 9.74
2020-21: 9.66
2021-22: 9.64
From the league's perspective, the fluctuation in the line graph above has more to do with "freedom of movement" than "non-basketball moves." On the latter, the officials have more or less accomplished their goal.
"Our estimates are that in the past we had as many as seven or more 'non-basketball moves' per game..." Wasch said. "We went into this season, and we tracked the preseason, and we saw that same roughly seven per game. At the start of the season, the first month, we were seeing about four or five of those per game, because players had yet to adjust and didn't know how we were going to treat it and whether we were going to call those. Fairly quickly, that dropped, and we spent the rest of the season at under two, about one and a half non-basketball moves per game."
Over the course of the season, as officials and players found the balance between "freedom of movement" and "non-basketball moves," the league returned to roughly the same foul rate it had in the past.
In 2020-21, teams averaged 19.3 fouls per game. In 2021-22, it was 19.6.
"If that offensive player goes back to shooting a normal jump shot after that pump fake, and the defender still makes contact with them, now it's a defensive foul again," Wasch said. "And so simply by adjusting to the non-basketball move interpretation, plays that in the early part of the year were not defensive fouls because of the offensive player was essentially negating it with their non-basketball moves were termed as defensive fouls. So, that's why you saw some of these free throw rates start to come back as the non-basketball moves disappeared and the players adjusted."
After a year and change with the point of education in place, the league has almost entirely wiped out the non-basketball moves without dramatically altering the flow of the game. Or in the parlance of NBA Twitter, it has made scoring more ethical.
That's something that fans and officials alike can be happy about.
"Referees want to do really well," McCutchen said. "And when you don’t get a play interpreted correctly, flop or otherwise, it most certainly eats away at you. Referees work as hard as our players, and I don’t think that that’s often understood, that we go back and watch tape. And we really take this to heart, that our job is to serve the game."
The quest to improve the game isn't over. It probably won't ever be. The Western Conference GM told me that certain players aren't "working the same routine as before," but they're figuring out how to create contact within the current interpretations of the rules.
This season will bring renewed fervor regarding calls, missed calls, flagrants and technicals. Mistakes will undoubtedly be made. And social media accounts like that of @DevInTheLab (also known by his self-given moniker “#1 ranked snitch ref”) will get plenty of content out of those mistakes.
But if those moments represent trends and not blips on the radar, or new tricks and shenanigans become widespread, you can expect the league and its teams to respond in much the same way it did to the rise of non-basketball moves, with communication, give-and-take and action.
"The part that was interesting to me is that some of [the teams] were saying, 'I'm seeing this increase in physicality and I like it,' and others were saying, 'I'm seeing this increase in physicality and I think the league should crack down on it by calling the game more tightly,'" Wasch said.
As is the case with Boston and Milwaukee, there are always different perspectives on these debates. All will be heard (online, published or through the league's official channels).
Whether that communication is in reference to current rules being interpreted incorrectly or a need for bigger adjustments, the NBA and its referees have shown a willingness to do both.
"We are imperfect creatures as referees, there’s no doubt about that," McCutchen said. "But we really do try to make sure that the game is where it should be."