Do we really need games to stop more often to watch referees huddle around a monitor?
On Monday, the NBA announced an expansion to its instant replay review system to allow for officials to call fouls that “should” have been called while reviewing out-of-bounds calls. Under this new system, referees will be allowed to retroactively hand out fouls when reviewing slow-motion replays, even if they weren’t called on the floor.
This is a disaster.
This new rule — intended to end moments where fans at home are watching the instant replay for an out-of-bounds call and say to themselves “oh that was such an obvious foul!” about a play that led to the ball going out off an opposing player — will do nothing to improve the NBA’s on-court product, nor will it make the results of games more accurate or accountable.
Instead, this change only further opens the floodgates for the infinite expansion of replay review to every corner of NBA basketball, and could kill what little remaining flow games have left.
Under the new rules, instant replay on an out-of-bounds play can cover whether a foul should've been called on the play, with the NBA referring in its announcement to a play when Kyrie Irving fouled Jaden McDaniels but Dallas got the ball. Now, a foul would be called instead. https://t.co/J8YIyQFr2u
— Tim Bontemps (@TimBontemps) September 10, 2024
We are going the wrong direction here. The NBA needs to abolish — or at least severely limit — the use of replay review. Challenges and instant replays bring games to a complete stop for several minutes at a time, often merely to confirm what the official on the floor initially called. It destroys the flow of the most beautiful sport in the world, most offensively when it grinds closing time to a halt, moments when basketball is supposed to be at its most intense. Yet instead of leaning into what makes the sport great, the NBA is leaning further into cowardly protecting itself and its referees from public criticism with as many accuracy-boosting machines as possible.
Replay review is a scourge on basketball, divorcing the NBA from an actual sport in favor of trying to create a technically perfect piece of entertainment while achieving the peaks of neither. The ability to challenge bang-bang block/charge calls is already one of the league’s biggest problems, as telling which is which is frequently all but impossible even in slow motion. But with this new rule announced Monday, the NBA has finally yielded their final hard line against the encroachment of replays and opened a completely new, completely disastrous frontier: retroactive fouls.
In professional sports, any rule that can assess a foul that “should” have been called during an unrelated or direct challenge process shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what fouls are. They are nebulous, undefined pieces of subjective interpretation, not finite, obvious infractions that could always be controlled with the proper technology. Like the block/charge, what is or isn’t a foul is often impossible to tell in slow motion, with both teams able to credibly make their case based on the same video. And that’s to say nothing of the thousands of close calls that happen in the flow of the game and will go unreviewed.
Physicality is the core of basketball, as well as other professional sports, and the real-time evaluation of what is too physical is what makes referees so important. The game is not played in frame-by-frame slow motion, and so evaluating physicality in such a sphere is ridiculous. And there is precedent and evidence to support this in the NFL.
In a panic response to an obviously missed pass interference in the 2019 NFC championship, the NFL allowed coaches to challenge pass interference calls and no-calls. But everyone soon realized that everything looks like pass interference in slow-motion and the rule caused mass confusion while only overturning 13 calls, so it was repealed a year later.
And to those who want the NBA to be as accurate as possible, flow be damned, it’s not as though replay review eliminates incorrect calls. It merely increases the amount of time and angles the officials have to make said incorrect calls. In the era of legal sports betting and half-billion-dollar contracts, it may be hard to argue that human error should be a part of sports, but there’s no way around it. Does more slow-motion actually make it easier to tell if Giannis Antetokounmpo’s left elbow hit a guy in the face, or the guy’s face just hit his left elbow? Perhaps it's better to simply accept and embrace the error than fight infinitely against it at the expense of the product.
Officiating is not an exact science, nor is basketball played in a Petri dish. Giving referees more lab equipment will make the NBA worse and further distance the game from the free-flowing physical beauty that makes basketball unique. But by prioritizing “accuracy” and making sure fouls that “should” be are called, the league is showing they care more about protecting referees from debate shows than the game itself.
