Did Steve Kerr save the NBA from the foul grifters?

A new proposition after the league office comes out strongly against the Midseason Officiating Switch Conspiracy Theory.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Box at the Italian Opera; Eva Gonzales; 1874

On Friday, I wrote at length about the NBA midseason officiating shift conspiracy shift. My core message there is that the theory is strident and premature based on how little data is available but that it would be very easy for the NBA to shade officiating toward defense without any sort of proclamation or dictat. Here’s a key couple of lines:

And the league can likely effect change indirectly through their private, internal grading of officials’ performance. For example, if the internal grades suggest a ref is calling too many fouls, and that ref wants a playoff assignment, that ref is probably going to adjust their practice unless they’re a veteran with a pre-punched ticket to the Finals.

ESPN’s Zach Lowe nabbed the league’s Joe Dumars and Monty McCutchen for a podcast interview about the theory. Lowe is sharp as a razor and knows the nitty gritty so well that Dumars nor McCutchen can’t B.S. him. He’s also perfectly reasonable and not prone to believing in wild theories. So this is a good match.

But it’s also clear that Dumars, in particular, came in with a clear objective of dispelling the notion that “the call” came from himself or Adam Silver. Here’s Dumars’ first statement:

“So I would say this first and foremost. There was — I would emphatically say — not one day of a meeting of the minds that we needed to change what we were seeing with scoring. Like, absolutely not Zach. Just … I mean, it’s just … I don’t know, when you hear stuff like that and you’re sitting in here or you walk into the office and you just kind of look around and you go … We haven’t said a word to Monty and the referees about changing anything.”

Emphasis mine. Later on, he reiterates that there was never a singular meeting where this was discussed.

This is the core message the league wants to communicate in response to the theory and the punditry around it: NOPE. WE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING. Fair enough. As I wrote, at the risk of looking naive, I was deeply skeptical that this was a centralized effort from the top. Joe Dumars, who basically runs the basketball side for the league, emphatically states there was no conversation about tamping down scoring from leadership.

Lowe pivots away from the most cartoonish vision of the theory to the more reasonable version, the one I suggested as plausible if not concrete: that the league has subtly and perhaps unintentionally nudged refs toward calling the game a little differently. And — perhaps unintentionally — McCutchen and Dumars essentially confirm that’s what happening.

Here’s McCutchen, offering up some details after discussing the role of himself and his retired ref advisors in ongoing coaching of the active officials throughout the season.

One of the things that’s been in the rulebook … is that if a dribbler has a straight line path to the basket, they cannot be crowded off that straight line pathway. The same is true for a defensive player’s pathway. … If you are both on parallel pathways, neither party is allowed to take someone off their pathway. And there has most certainly been some coaching this year, and teaching this year, about making sure we remain consistent from Monday night to Tuesday night to Wednesday night. And I do think we had some work there that we had slipped in. And so we most certainly have been teaching what our rulebook currently states is good basketball so that there is a balance for competition to Joe’s point. Good competition isn’t score-based. It is based in an equitable situation for both offensive and defensive players to be reasonably expect to be able to compete so that neither party is placed at a disadvantage. We most certainly have done that coaching this year.

Again, emphasis mine. This is essentially confirmation that officials have been coached as the season has progressed that defenders need the same right to space as offensive players. That doesn’t explain a sudden shift in how games are called — and so it’s not quite confirmation of the most strident visions of the theory — but it does, in my interpretation, acknowledge that this isn’t random. It tells me that the basketball hivemind at Olympic Tower has been talking about the right to space for defenders, and officials have been coached to find some consistency in how they are calling fouls as a result.

I do think outside influence plays a major role here. Not influence from talking heads on T.V. or fans tweeting or anything like that. I think there are certain voices that resonate with Dumars, with McCutchen, with McCutchen’s ref coaches. Like this one.

My theory is that this comment from Steve Kerr and a few more like it from other coaches hit the league office hard and sparked some conversations. Kerr is an NBA lifer, he is seen as an even-keeled voice, and he coaches Team USA, which means he has even more inroads at the league office than most veteran coaches. He is a trusted voice, and this comment was pitch perfect for what Kerr wanted to communicate. He didn’t make it about a specific player — Nikola Jokic, who no one considers a foul grifter, was the free throw maven in question on this particular night, so it couldn’t be boiled down to sour grapes over an opponent widely tagged to be a grifter. He didn’t make it about the officials’ own incompetence. He made it about Joe and Monty. He made it about how officials are being taught to call games. He served this quote up for McCutchen specifically, in order to affect change on how games were called.

That’s my theory anyways. And while Dumars and McCutchen didn’t exactly confirm that feedback from outside sources — like Steve Kerr — impacted what McCutchen’s team of advisors decided to emphasize in their interactions with working refs, it’s clear that at some point this became the focus, and the data appears to show there’s been a shift of some magnitude. More grist for the discourse, if nothing else.

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And 1

McCutchen named three of his five retired ref coaches: Mark Wunderlich (OK), Bennett Salvatore (uhh) and JOEY CRAWFORD.

No wonder we have so many taunting techs and hair-trigger ejections. JOEY CRAWFORD IS TEACHING AND COACHING OUR REFS?! That’s like giving Draymond Green a spot leading meditations on the Headspace app.