NBA cracking down on ‘abnormal’ moves to draw fouls; officials won’t be ‘manipulated’
Some of the NBA’s most prolific scorers have gone to great lengths to master the art of creating contact to draw fouls on defenders, but officials are being instructed to call those plays differently this season.
Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s senior vice president of referee training and development, said the league’s competition committee felt offensive players were gaining too much of an advantage by using unnatural movements to draw fouls. Some of the plays that have resulted in fouls against helpless defenders will be no-calls this season, and some will be called offensive fouls.
“We want basketball to be played, not manipulated,” McCutchen said during a Zoom call with reporters Thursday.
McCutchen presented several plays on video, some involving stars such as Luka Doncic, Trae Young and Stephen Curry, to explain how those plays will be called this season. In some instances, players used pump fakes to lure defenders into the air, leaned in to draw contact and launched awkward 3-point attempts, resulting in three-shot fouls. In other cases, ballhandlers penetrated the paint, changed pace to draw in defenders, then veered left or right to create contact while hoisting up off-balance shots.
Now, McCutchen said, those players could be called for offensive fouls if they use “overt, abrupt or abnormal” motions to create contact.
“We don’t want to disincentivize free throws,” McCutchen said. “We want to disincentivize abnormal moves whose sole purpose is to get free throws.”
McCutchen pointed to examples of marginal and non-marginal contact to explain why some plays will no longer be considered fouls, saying “one of the ideas of this is to bring flow back into the game.”
McCutchen said these changes are being explained in great detail this week at the annual referee preseason camp. He said officials have reviewed more than 500 plays, “helping define what is abrupt, what is overt, what is abnormal.” McCutchen emphasized this initiative is not a rule change, but a change in the way the rules are interpreted.
Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox shrugged off the changes. Fox was ninth in the NBA with 7.19 free-throw attempts per game last season, but rather than creating contact away from the basket, he draws most of his fouls while driving to the hoop. The Kings have actually argued he doesn’t get enough foul calls, siting specific and sometimes glaring examples.
Fox said this change in the way the rules are interpreted won’t affect the way he plays at the offensive end of the floor.
“I mean, if you’re asking me personally, I really don’t care,” Fox said. “I’ve had meetings and things like that. I’ve been told, if I do this, that will be a foul. If I do that, this will be a foul, and I’m like, ‘Well, I play basketball, ultimately.’ If I’m going to the basket to make the shot, I’m not worried about getting fouled. At the end of the day, it doesn’t change how I play, so it really doesn’t matter to me at all, to be honest.”
Kings guard Tyrese Haliburton sounded skeptical, saying players who specialize in drawing fouls will still find a way to get to the free-throw line.
“We’ll see. We’ll see,” Haliburton said. “We’ll see when we get in the games. You can say what you want, but it’s different in live action. The great players, they find a way to figure it out, whatever that may be, so they can get to the free-throw line and get some rhythm shots, so we’ll see how it’s officiated. I don’t know if I’m buying all that, but we’ll see when we get into it.”
This story was originally published September 24, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
