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The NBA, whether they wish to admit it or not, has an officiating problem. The problem is deep, it’s structural, and the NBA is either oblivious to it, or worse, they consider it to be a feature instead of a bug.
It’s a problem that Jaylen Brown has been highlighting for quite some time now, and it’s worth a deeper dive.
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To start with, officiating in the NBA is incredibly difficult. This is a fast-paced game with a lot of close contact, all of which has to be judged as incidental or illegal in, literally, a split second of time.
There are fouls that are blindingly obvious, ones which we can see from a thousand miles away through bird’s eye views of the court on our television screens, and then there are fouls that literally occur in only a few tenths of a second, real time, and officials have to identify those fouls without the benefit of slow-motion replay.
That this is a difficult task that is done well by many officials is a positive reflection on those officials who approach their job with a professional disposition and a deep-seated desire to get things right.
Unfortunately for them, it’s probably harder to get things right in the NBA than in any other major professional sport here in the states.
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The fastest paced game among the top four professional leagues has the fewest number of officials, both in absolute terms and as a ratio to participating players.
I believe this is directly, although not entirely, responsible for the plague of flopping. Players learn at a very early age that they need to exaggerate the effect of contact to catch the attention of officials who are trying to monitor the actions of multiple players. From there it’s a short step to outright faking contact. Mind you, the NBA does have a flopping penalty, but they’ve apparently put it in a box out in the garage and have forgotten about it. Jaylen Brown called it foul baiting after Thurdsay’s game against the Thunder during a postgame press conference that might net him another $35,000 hit to his wallet.
Lack of an extra official, I believe, is also responsible for wildly inconsistent treatment of…
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Publish date : 2026-03-14 13:22:00
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