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Commentary by Matt Hickman
Herald/Review
n high school it was easy — I just didn’t play any defense.
But by college, I realized this could no longer stand.
Lacking the lateral quickness to guard anybody on the perimeter as well as the upper-body strength to really bang for very long in the post, I had to come up with another way to keep from being a total liability on defense.
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Taking charges was scary at first. But pretty soon I began to realize it was a lot easier if you fell a fraction of a second before the contact took place. Initially, I did this to avoid painful and sweaty collisions, but before long I realized that by controlling the timing of the fall I was the one really in control of the play. I began paying attention to where the officials stood and what the scene of the crime would look like to them as I suddenly crashed to the hardwood with an astounding thud. A ballhandler’s dipped shoulder or guilty expression was the smoking gun.
As a result, I led the ACCAC in charges taken for two straight years, though I don’t think it was a stat anyone was actually tracking.
Now, the NBA wants to demean my entire body of work as unsportsmanlike. On Thursday the league announced plans to begin fining players for “flopping,” or dramatically exaggerating the impact of contact, or lack thereof.
“Here, here!” cry the pundits who apparently think basketball is no longer a game whose essence is of movement and positioning, but rather the brute physics of sumo wrestling, tug-of-war or cockfighting.
“Oh come on!” Bill Walton will frequently cry when a player hits the deck. “There’s no way in the holy name of Jerry Garcia the offensive player is big enough to knock him over like that.”
If I’m driving down the road with established position, and you run into me, no matter how much bigger my car is than yours, no matter how light the contact, no matter how little the damage and no matter how shamelessly I’m crying “whiplash!” the fact remains you violated my right of way. And that’s all the traffic cop, the referee of the road, has to go by to determine who is at fault.
Which makes it all the more interesting that it is the league office and not the referees who will be enforcing this dictum that takes effect next season.
The refs know perfectly well that when Manu Ginobili acts as though he’s been shot with a cannonball, he is flopping. Yet, sometimes, they give him the charge call anyway. Broadcast analysts immediately claim upon review that the ref was fooled and the charge-taker “deserves an Oscar.”
The refs aren’t fooled. They see these kinds of plays thousands of times each year and they know which guys have a reputation for flopping. They understand that a player’s right to his space is more important than whether his dramatic fall violates some unwritten machismo code.
If the NBA wants to reduce the number of charge calls, they’re going about it all wrong.
The better way would be to first, eliminate the semicircle around the hoop. Because of this asinine and unconstitutional guideline, refs are no longer interested in seeing whether the defender has established his position; only whether his heels are touching this arbitrary arc.
This will never happen however, because the league put the arc in as an exercise in worship to the altar of the almighty slam dunk.
It virtually eliminates the very possibility of taking a charge on a dunk as though a dunker deserves preference to a jump shooter.
They are acquiescing to the wishes of fans who would like their basketball to be more like football.
These are the fans who will mindlessly watch Sportscenter replays from 16 different angles of LeBron dunking in the vicinity of Kevin Garnett, oohing and aahing and grunting their way into forgetting the material fact that it’s still just two damn points.
mom wrote on Jun 2, 2008 8:03 AM: