Crime Should Not Pay
Call it the intentional foul strategy. Call it a form of late game coaching strategy. Call it Hack-A-Shaq, Hack-a-Jack (if it were against Jarrett Jack) or Hack-a-Jordan (DeAndre, DJ, not Michael, MJ, as I’m guessing no one would EVER try this strategy on the legendary Chicago Bull). There’s a loophole in the rules of professional basketball needs to be fixed. It is undermining the integrity of professional basketball. It is making the sport of pro basketball look BAD.
The game of basketball is very simple to understand, really. YOU, the team on offense, goes down with the ball, dribbles around, tries to pass it around and do what it takes to create a shooting opportunity to score a basket, while THEY, the defensive team, battles against you to try to stop you from scoring a basket. And conversely, while THEY are on offense, they try to score and YOU try to stop them. It’s a very pure idea. He who plays better offense and/or defense than the other guy, and ends up scoring the most points, wins the game.
But, there is a jurisprudence component to the game. Since either of the two teams can “cheat” or do things so excessively that they break the rules and go beyond the concept of “fair play” (usually on defense where you obviously can’t just tackle the guy to prevent him from shooting), there are referees who call fouls and try to do what it takes from a legal standpoint to make sure the game is played fair and by the rules of the sport. No one is “supposed to” gain advantage by anything other than their fair and legal play on the court in the course of each competitive game. Games, in a sense, should be decided by the play on the court by the players, and not by the jurisprudence system. Fans in general (not counting the partisan fans of each city that only want to see THEIR team win, never mind if they had to cheat to get there) want to see the team that plays better that day or night be the team that wins. That is what sports are.
But, there are loopholes that sometimes pop up in the system that allows a team to utilize that loophole and in a sense, game the system of rules and governance of fair play to gain an advantage. In football, you used to be able to “fake an injury” near the end of a game to try to stop a clock from moving. Football “closed up” that loophole. Hockey players would sometimes “dive” to the ice to try to make it look like they were tripped to try to fool the refs and gain an advantage, but that practice too was halted when the league decided to punish the “divers” who were trying to game the system. Baseball too outlawed the idea of pitchers doctoring the baseball to try to gain an unfair advantage.
The whole idea is to have a simple interpretation of the rules of each sport be that the object is for the team that plays the best “that game” should win, and the team that tries to “cheat” or bend the rules should be punished accordingly. In other sports (off the top of my head, I can think of boxing, horse racing, track and field), if anyone is caught cheating, they get disqualified. (for some reason, roller derby and pro wrestling DON’T fall into that category, Hmmm). The concept of fair play on the field of play within the rules is the number one axiom of all legitimate sports.
But, what happens when something “within the rules” is inherently a WRONG application of that concept of sports justice? Using the concept of the person who commits the foul/penalty as the “criminal” and the person who is fouled/obstructed as the “victim,” and the rule of that sport being interpreted as “the law,” what then, is supposed to happen when you have a rule or law that rewards the criminal and penalizes the victim?
What you have (at least in this instance) is the outrageous action that happens at the end of pro basketball games, where one team, in a completely UNRELATED action to the course of play, intentionally fouls (commits a crime against) another team’s player (the victim), and FORCES that “victim” to have to do something (shoot a free throw when he’s not a good free throw shooter) that he doesn’t want to have to do. This foul, by the way, completely changes the dynamic. A player not involved in the play that is forced to shoot free throws instead of the team getting to play normal, competitive basketball is pretty much the same as if a pro football team could commit an intentional defensive penalty and force Tim Tebow to play quarterback instead of Tom Brady. It’s THAT bad of an odor. It’s almost like this ability to intentionally foul changes the sport into something entirely different.
Mind you, in this “Hack-a-Shaq” concept, the PUNISHMENT for someone who is committing a “crime” is actually rewarding that team for committing a crime and is penalizing the victim and the team who was doing nothing wrong, nothing illegal. Oh, the player should just be able to make free throws, some people might say. But, what if he can’t make free throws? (usually, the person is so big and strong, the one thing he cannot do well is to make finesse shots like free throws) Should the rules of fair play be that a “criminal act,” that sometimes takes place 80 feet away from where the action on the court is taking place, should then have as its “punishment” for that crime be something that actually rewards the perpetrator and punishes the victim? The answer is a big “NO.”
If this happened in the real world, there would be an outcry. People would not tolerate the idea that the criminals were not only getting away with their criminal behavior, they were actually being rewarded for it. They would not tolerate that the victims were “being blamed” for crimes that the criminals were committing. They would not tolerate that the system of justice could be so skewed as to actually reward the CONTINUED committing of more “crimes.” Hell, Congress thought so negatively about the “unfairness” of baseball players using steroids, they held hearings to try to stop it.
The problem with this whole NBA loophole is that it is violating the very axiom that sports are being played under. That is, that the games should be played with the rules of the game supporting the idea of fair play. And that anything that occurs where a team tries to gain an advantage with UNFAIR play, that act should be punished accordingly. The object is not to have rules that can be gamed. It’s to have rules that CANNOT be gamed. It’s to have a sport that rewards good play and that does NOT reward dubious tactics. It’s to have its rules support the notion that crime does not pay.
This whole thing can be fixed, of course. And it’s not like there hasn’t been tweaks to the official “penalty for fouls” rules before. The NBA used to have a “three to make two” rule, where, if the player was fouled in the act of shooting, he would get three free throw attempts, if necessary, to make the two points. It was dropped when too many free throw attempts seemed to slow down the pace of the game. They also had a “one plus one” rule, where the player HAD to make the first free throw to earn the second. Too punitive to the free throwing team and too rewarding to the offending team, so they dropped that too. They used to penalize with two free throws for any “back court foul,” but they stopped that too.
They can fix this one too. Some of the possibilities include the team being fouled getting two free throws AND the ball out of bounds (a bit too punitive to the fouling team, although it would STOP the intentional foul practice IMMEDIATELY). Or, the old “three to make two” rule, where it would again seem to not make fouling so attractive. Or, the team being fouled could have the option of substituting their best free thrower on the court at the time of the foul for the two fee throws, to make the situation LESS rewarding for the offending team. Or, a team could be given the option of declining having to take the free throws and would allow them to simply maintain possession.
Whatever the tweak that might be created, something NEEDS to be done to make the fans of the game NOT have to see situations where the game gets slowed down to a crawl AND where one team is allowed to game the system and create situations that really turns a free flowing game like basketball into a series of fouls and free throws that completely take the beauty out of the sport. People come to games to see slam dunks, fast breaks and jump shots, NOT fouls away from the play and bad shooters missing free throws.
This is a rules problem going on here. A rule with a loophole and the interpretation of that rule. The penalty for an intentional foul must put real punishment on the fouling team and should not be rewarding them. A foul is a crime, not a good thing. There should be punishment for fouling someone who is not involved in the play that is GREATER than a foul of someone who is part of the play, because the intentional foul is being done for the sole purpose of gaming the system. Change the penalty for the intentional foul to something that accurately suits the crime and you will deter bad, actual non-basketball things from happening. The NBA should be above allowing this type of stuff to be happening.
Otherwise, the sport of basketball runs the risk of being seen as a bogus sport, a sport that sinks about as low as pro wrestling and roller derby. And it runs the risk that its games, that are currently seen by large numbers of people from a national TV audience, will start being looked at as if they have just become a big, freakin’ joke.
