Re:on a variety of Celtics comments...

[Ryan W <ubiquitous_am_i@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Shawn Niles <shizzjr@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Just had a thought about officiating. Obviously it
> could never work, but 
> wouldn't it be interesting if the players identities
> were disguised somehow 
> during the games. What if the refs didn't know who
> each player was but only 
> knew what team they played for.
> 
> (For instance, if the players had to wear masks or
> something. Again, I know 
> it would never work because the refs could still
> make out body types and 
> whatnot; no one is going to confuse Shaq for Tony
> Battie. But just go with 
> my premise here for a minute.)
> 
> How quickly do you think the 'star' players would
> foul out? How many more 
> fouls would a guy like Kobe or T-Mac or Shaq or Kidd
> get called on them if 
> the refs didn't know who they were? What about
> Jordan? I guarantee you he 
> wouldn't have gone 10 years without fouling out or
> however long it was.
> 
> Then, if you flip it arounf the other way, how
> drastically would their 
> scoring averges go down? I think of the touch fouls
> Kobe gets (like on his 
> 3-pointer the other night). No way would Jordan have
> averaged the same 
> amount of points over his career.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> 


That, of course, wouldn't work for practical reasons,
although I do agree with both the premise and
conclusion of your argument.  Here's a better thought
experiment.  It seems that the biggest problem in
officiating (besides the preconceptions they
undoubtedly have regarding certain players) is the
phenomenon of flopping.  With players "acting" to get
calls, it only serves to increase the difficulty of
officiating.  Thus we need some way of restricting
"flopping".  It seems the best way to do this is to
attack it like flagarant fouls have been attacked; by
issuing tecnical fouls varying on intent.  While the
flagarant fouls are extremely arbitrary (in the way in
which they are called), nonetheless, they still serve
a regulatory function, i.e., they serve to frighten
players (by way of the threat of disqualification)
into not committing hard fouls.  Likewise, while it
would be hard to determine intent in regard to
"flopping" if there was a rule regarding the
prohibition of "flopping" (perhaps judged on degree,
such as the Flagarant I or II distinction regarding
hard fouls), nonetheless there would be an incentive
to not appear to be "flopping", which would only lead
to better basketball.  And thus, we wouldn't have
Antione calling out Reggie Miller to be a man; i.e.
telling him to quit "flopping" to fake out official
and instead be honest and play hard defense like any
"real" man would do.

Ryan

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