The NBA has issued a mandate this season for referees to crack down on players overreacting to what they perceive to be bad calls, and many league observers are hoping Wednesday night’s Celtics-Knicks preseason game does not portend what will happen when the regular season starts.
Boston center Jermaine O’Neal drew his second technical foul in as many nights for moderately reacting to a foul called on him, and Kevin Garnett was ejected after being hit with two technicals within seconds of one another.
“I walked up to [the official] and he said, ‘Jermaine, walk away,’” O’Neal said after the game. “I said, ‘I can’t talk to you now?’ Just like that. Soft, bedroom voice. And he gave me a tech. ... To me, that’s too quick. Way too quick.”
Garnett was given his first technical for trying to demonstrate to a ref how a Knicks player fouled him and was ejected after being slapped with his second “T” for laughing about the first.
”This is stupid!” Celtics TV analyst Tommy Heinsohn said in reaction to the Garnett ejection “… the NBA, it’s stupid!”
“These new rules are very, very excessive,” O’Neal told Yahoo! Sports before the game. “They’re telling us the general public says we whine too much, but look at the way the NBA’s business is growing globally. I can see both sides of this. No one wants to see complaining over every call, but look at the rules. You can’t even make a hand gesture — never mind say anything.”
NBA writers are also complaining the new rules are excessive.
”Until both players and referees adjust to [NBA Commissioner David] Stern’s latest new world order,” CBS Sports’ Ken Berger writes, “we have a mess — a needless controversy of the NBA’s own making.”
Yahoo! Sports Adrian Wojnarowski adds, “The biggest stars can be some of the NBA’s most emotional gripers, and they ought dare Stern and his refs to start tossing them out of regular season games. The league office loves to bully, but never has the stomach for a true fight. Let’s see how fast the public repudiates the NBA and this false premise born of phony market research.”
In fact, two players agents told Yahoo! that they want the players’ association to contest the legality of the new rules as it applies to the collective bargaining agreement.
But the mandate has its supporters, too, including Pistons guard Ben Gordon. “I’m all for it, and I think it will make the game go a lot smoother,” Gordon told the Detroit Free Press. “There are times when guys are complaining a bit excessively. It kind of slows the game down. It messes with the flow of the game.”
Celtics coach Doc Rivers did not exactly come to his players’ defense after Thursday’s game.
“Listen, the rules are the rules and we have to have more discipline,” Rivers told the Boston Globe. “Kevin, JO, I told all of them that. Whether they deserved it or not, I think both sides, we’ve got to use our judgment a little bit better. It shouldn’t be just a tech [for debating a call]. Having said that, we know the rules. We have to have discipline. We can’t worry about them. We have to be better.’’
And Yahoo! NBA blogger Kelly Dwyer points out that officials liberally doling out technical fouls during the preseason is nothing new. “Seemingly every fall the league announces that it will do more to crack down on traveling violations, while promising to enforce stricter technical-foul rules along the way,” Dwyer writes. “And, every fall, the NBA follows through on this promise. At least until the regular season starts.”
Read more:
http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2010-10-14/nba-world-abuzz-about-new-technical-foul-rules#ixzz12LsZxXZu
