Saturday’s Georgetown- Ohio State game was hyped as featuring a clash of two seven-foot centers, but failed to live up to that billing, as Greg Oden picked up two quick fouls, and sat for most of the first half. Roy Hibbert of Georgetown didn’t fare much better.
This has prompted a bunch of pinhead commentators, most notably Dick Vitale and Billy Packer to start agitating for changes in the rules so that star players won’t have to worry about foul trouble. Vitale wants to move to six fouls before disqualification, but he doesn’t stop there. He thinks that you should be able to continue playing a guy with six fouls, and any subsequent fouls they commit should count as intentional fouls– two shots plus the ball. Billy Packer was pushing for something similar during the first half of the champioship last night.
You know, if you’re going to start tinkering with the rules, there’s another one that really limits spectacular plays: Traveling. If we just let guys tuck the ball under their arm, and run with it, that’d really free things up.
The thing is, while you could construct a perfectly good game using those rules, it wouldn’t be basketball.
Vitale said several times before I hit “mute” that basketball is the only sport where teams can lose players from the game for things that are part of normal game play. Which is perfectly true, but it’s not a Bad Thing– it’s part of what makes the game unique. The idea of disqualifying players for physical contact goes back to the very beginning of the sport. Fouling out is an essential part of the game, and the strategy of the game– it’s not some tinker-around-the-margins thing, it’s one of the defining characteristics of basketball, just like the traveling rule, and the ten-foot hoop. You have to put the ball through a hoop up in the air, you’re not allowed to make contact with another player, and you’re not allowed to run with the ball: these are the essential elements that define basketball.
These are not rules to be thrown aside lightly, because a few games didn’t turn out the way you wanted. It sucks that a few quick whistles put Oden and Hibbert on the bench, but that’s basketball. Things don’t always go the way you’d like, and you need to deal with it.
Vitale’s justification is that the players have become stronger and faster, and the rules need to change to reflect this, but that’s a bunch of crap. The fouls that were called on Oden and Hibbert were not the result of their prodigious athleticism not fitting within the antiquated rules of basketball– Oden got whistled for a moving screen on a play where he pulled the patented Duke hip-check move to make sure he caught the defender. It would’ve been a foul on a five-nine shooting guard, let alone a seven-foot prodigy, and the ref was perfectly correct to call it such.
And it’s not like it should be a surprise to these players and coaches that too many fouls get you disqualified from the game– that’s only been the rule for the last hundred years or so. Oden took a chance (a dumb one), and he and his coach have to deal with the consequences. This is why Ohio State coach Thad Matta gets paid the big bucks: to make decisions in situations like this.
I don’t really think this is going to go anywhere, because it’s a stupid suggestion even by Vitale’s standards. And the last rule change he loudly and publicly lobbied for– the short-lived change from alternate possession in a jump-ball situation to giving the ball to the defense– was a travesty, so I doubt people will be quick to accept this idiocy. But it’s important to note that this is an idiotic suggestion, and one that strikes at the very core of what makes basketball a unique sport.