One of the things that stands out about Team USA in the Olympics isn’t what they're doing, but one of the things these NBA players aren’t doing.
Complaining to the refs.
There are conversations, for sure. There are disagreements about calls that are calmly discussed. But there hasn’t been as much as a wave of the hand in the direction of the official.
To add to that, aside from a couple of early attempts from Joel Embiid that went uncalled, the flopping that usually precedes the complaining hasn’t shown itself either.
This begs the question, if flopping and complaining can be curtailed in short order in a tournament like the Olympics, why can’t it be better controlled in the NBA?
I think Embiid’s performance especially should force the NBA to take a look at how the league’s games are officiated. Embiid opened up his Team USA stint with a pair of grifting post-ups specifically designed to draw fouls first instead of going up to score, and neither was called. Since then, Embiid has been mostly ineffective on offense, unable to create for himself and scoring almost entirely off dump-offs and mid-range jumpers.
He’s not living at the line, and because of that, he’s mostly been a negative. He’s hardly playing like the MVP candidate he normally is. Maybe some of that is also due to his meniscus surgery recovery. Maybe some of it is the lack of conditioning because of that injury. But without the benefit of a friendly whistle, Embiid isn’t hitting the same peaks he hits in the NBA.
The league has tried to address flopping in the past. They instituted a series of fines designed to punish the flops by hitting guys in their wallets, but the league has seemingly lost interest in issuing those. They then created a technical foul for flopping, but that also went away in a hurry. It turns out the people on the floor getting fooled by the flopping weren’t too keen on spending time trying to figure out if they were being fooled by the flopping.
What the league hasn’t really tried in earnest, at least not until after this past All-Star break when they let everything go, is not calling the flops in the first place.
The Olympics should get the NBA to take a good, hard look at the officials and teach them player tendencies when they're grifting for foul calls. They started to do that a couple of seasons ago when they stopped calling certain plays fouls (like the Trae Young stop and jump backwards into a trailing defender). It was effective, and it exposed certain weaknesses in Young, James Harden, and others who spent a lot of time padding scoring stats at the free-throw line.
Now it’s time to take it a step further and eliminate the flopping for good by simply not calling it. The biggest punishment a guy flailing and falling to the floor can get is causing a disadvantage for his team by doing it. If a guy wants to scream, throw his head back, and fall to try to fake his way to the line, letting the other team play on and get a five-on-four is the best antidote.
Consider it the NBA’s form of a power play. Give the other team enough man advantages and they're going to make it painful. And if the simple solution is to stop acting and start playing basketball, then guess how NBA players will adjust.
From there, the other complaining will slow down as well. If everyone is just aware that some contact will be allowed, then they’ll just play through it and move on. The Jayson Tatum hand-wave tech is almost always a product of “they get that call down there, why can’t I get it here?” If the calls are even, then a lot of that frustration goes away.
Watching the Olympics makes me feel like I’m watching pure basketball. The pace of the game and the ball movement makes the game feel fast and fun. Of course, the two fewer minutes in each quarter help that along, but the game is also moving at a good clip regardless of the length of quarters. Two more minutes of playing time wouldn’t make too much of a difference with the game being called the way it is.
And there are also fewer timeouts in general, which we’ll never see in the NBA because that's where they get their money. Nationally televised games can be a drag because not only are there more timeouts than Olympic basketball, but they're all three or three-and-a-half minutes as compared to two-and-a-half for a locally broadcast game. Add to it ESPN’s insistence on starting their games 15 minutes past the posted start time fans walk into games already feeling like they're dragging.
Money talks, so that's not changing. But what can change is the pace of the game once its played. The games we’re watching this summer can be a blueprint for how NBA officials can help the product. Basketball is a fast, fun, up-and-down game with the winner being the team that can put the ball in the basket more than the other team. That should be determined by the skill on the floor, not one’s ability to fall convincingly.