By
ERRNTKNGHT (yes, that's how he spelled it) of
PHOENIX
From
CBS Sportsline.com “Expect the zone defense to be legalized next
season. Following a conversation between SportsLine.com and commissioner
David Stern, the transition seems inevitable. It won't change the game
much, but at least it will eliminate the ludicrous illegal defenses that
are called erratically, confounding coaches, players and fans and slowing
down the game with the officials constantly explaining themselves. “
Personally,
I dislike watching basketball being played when zone defenses are used
- to the point that I prefer the illegal defense rules, as bad as they
are. To say allowing zone defenses won’t change the game much is
a ridiculous statement - I have eyes and I do watch college basketball
enough to see the effect zone defenses have on the game. I understand
the problem with those rules - they are difficult to understand, interrupt
the flow of the game, and coaches and players are constantly screeching
from the sidelines about the opponents being 'illegal'. In addition,
we see teams getting into strange offensive alignments in order to benefit
from the details of illegal D. rules.
I
would like to see the illegal defense rules changed - simplified dramatically.
Throw away all the details and replace them with the single dictum:
Thou shalt not play zone defense. The referees would be instructed
to call an illegal defense whenever, in their opinion, the defense was
too zone-like. Further, the refs would be forbidden to ever explain
to a coach, player or 'the media' why he made a particular call or what
are the criteria for such calls.
If
you think such a method is unworkable then you didn't watch the NBA thirty
years ago because for many years the rule was just that vague. It
could well be that the referees had some 'rules of thumb' that they used
to decide when a defense was too zone-like but the broadcast commentators
were ignorant of what they were, and, most likely, the coaches and players
were as well.
I
started watching the NBA in 1954, and it was a couple of years, at least,
before I even knew that zones were illegal - part of that is probably due
to my being naive, but also, the illegal defense calls were very uncommon.
The first time I recall it being a significant topic of conversation was
when Holzman's Knicks (Frazier-Debusshere-Reed et al.) used a 'switching
man-to-man' defense, which some other coaches felt was too zone-like.
Even that was a minor tempest.
The
trouble started some years later when the league decided to formalize the
rules for illegal defense calls. I always figured it was the coaches
who were behind that change and, at first, I thought it made sense.
I mean, if you're going to forbid people doing something then why not tell
them exactly what it is that you are forbidding? It did take a couple
of years for the full effect of the rule change to become apparent, and
we learned why it was a bad idea to be so explicit. Besides the sideline
carping and the disputations, with an explicit set of rules the coaches
began to do everything the rules didn't forbid so defenses became more
zone-like. They had their players come as close to breaking the rules
as they could get away with which led to a huge increase in the number
of illegal defense calls. In the 'good old days' there was an illegal
D. call once every ten or so games which gave way to games in which four
or five such calls were not a rarity. It was a disaster on every
front - a textbook case of how to turn a non-problem into an ugly mess.
Every
few years the league has fiddled with the details of the rules, hoping
to improve matters but no significant progress has ever been made.
The reason is simple - it is human nature to follow the letter of the law
when it is to your advantage to do so. A coach might even feel like
he is not earning his pay if he didn't do everything to win that the rules
allow. The cure is also simple - don't elaborate the letter of the
law, so they have no choice but to follow the spirit of it!
The
coaches will howl about a regression to the old way of doing things because
it is human nature to imagine that you can exploit the fine details better
than others but, happily, no one gets much of an advantage for long.
And the game does suffer, as we have learned - to our chagrin.
