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JLS mentions how he likes when refs officiate with their mouths instead of their whistles when defusing a conflict. I find that practice, along with officiating with a whistle on a play following a dust-up (as in the quick off-the-ball foul called on one of the participants in the previous confrontation just to “settle things down”), completely ridiculous. Refs, I think, should restrict themselves to passing judgment on what happens and should avoid actually controlling the action on the court except as players adjust to the officials’ calls. Refs, for example, don’t step in and prevent a player from traveling before he does so because that’s a basic rule that any player should follow, but they often talk an angered player off the ledge, influencing his behavior in relation to the rules without actually punishing him. Preventing one team’s transgression puts that team’s opponent at a disadvantage because the refs have purposely guided a player’s behavior in a way advantageous to him and to his team. The rules have corresponding punishments for violating rules; let the refs control a game that way.
And I think they would if college basketball’s rules were more reasonable regarding technical fouls. If a tech didn’t also count as a personal foul, refs would likely be more inclined to actually call one when warranted, and they may actually be less inclined to cop out with the double technical or with no call at all. And speaking of cop-outs (cops-out?), what’s with all the jump balls on blocked shots? Doesn’t the offensive player actually have to land with the ball as the defender blocks the shot as the offensive player travels all the way to the ground? And as for another rule change, I wouldn’t mind if that play were ruled a travel, which would make more sense to me and which would reward the defense for offensive ineptitude.
Freddie deBoer proposes lowering the rims in the women’s game, an idea that would actually make some sense, though 9’ seems a little too low. Maybe 9’6” would be a fair compromise. As for that other big difference between the men’s and women’s game (that is, the size of the ball), I disagree that women would acclimate themselves to a larger ball. Compared to men, women already struggle with the smaller ball that they currently use, and that ball handling and shooting “are the strengths of the women's game already” is an idea commonly proposed to bolster the perception of women’s basketball that just doesn’t hold up, at least under my quick and rudimentary look at some statistics. Here are the numbers for field goal percentage, turnovers, and assists by team in the NBA for this season and the WNBA for 2005:
FG% NBA: Median 45.2, Range 42.9-48.2; WNBA: Median 42.8, Range 40-45.2
Assists/game NBA: Median 20.65, Range 17.8-26.6; WNBA: Median 15.2, Range 12.7-16.9
TO/game NBA: Median 13.6, Range 10.8-16.9; WNBA: Median 14.7, Range 12.5-16.8
But wait, women’s games are 40 minutes while men’s are 48:
Assists/min NBA: Median .43, Range .37-.55; WNBA: Median .38, Range .32-.42
TO/min NBA: Median .28, Range .23-.35; WNBA: Median .38, Range .31-.42
Better stats for measuring shooting and ball handling may exist, but these were are the ready and pretty standard, so I used them. The numbers for turnovers especially suggest to me that women’s basketball has bigger problems than being relatively ground bound and that it’s not as fundamentally sound as people say.
