The debate about WNBA officiating heated up again recently. Mike DiMauro wrote a column saying that it sucks. League commish Donna Orender, who admits that she hears frequent fan complaints about refs, responded by saying that the league takes officiating seriously and puts a lot of effort into training.
The complaints have been around for years. Of course, fans (and coaches and players and writers) in every sport complain about the officiating, and it's possible that our complaints are just another manifestation of a universal (and banal) feature of sports psychology.
Still, given the frequency of the complaints — and given that they often come from some of the game's biggest advocates and most respected observers — it's worth examining the issue in a serious and systematic way. Is the officiating in women's basketball really bad? If so, what is the reason, and what can be done about it?
My own preliminary view is that reffing in women's basketball isn't quite as good as we'd like it to be, but the deficiencies are mostly the result of inevitable financial and other constraints.
I also believe, first and foremost, that reffing basketball is just really damn hard.
Enforcing rules in any system can be difficult. There are some crystalline bright-line rules whose application is clear, but there are also some muddy interpretive standards that don't produce clear results.
The Constitution, for example, says that no person can be President "who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years." That's a bright-line rule. Everyone agrees what it means, and it's easy to apply.
Other provisions are less easy, such as the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. Reasonableness is a vague interpretive standard. People disagree about what is reasonable in different contexts, and it's therefore not always clear how to apply the Fourth Amendment to concrete circumstances. (That's why criticism that judges should "just enforce the Constitution as it is written" are so appallingly stupid.)
Some basketball rules are easy. E.g.: a player can't go out of bounds with the ball. We all know what that rule means, and it's relatively easy to enforce.
The great difficulty in basketball officiating comes in interpreting and applying the rules regarding physical contact between opposing players. The governing concepts — whether a player gains an advatage, whether contact is incidental, whether a player has legal defensive position, whether a player initiated contact (when both are moving), etc. — are vague. The interpretive standards are difficult to understand, and even more difficult to apply in the course of a fast-moving game.
The difficulty, moreover, is omnipresent in the game, because opposing players are constantly making physical contact with one another all over the court.
With that in mind, let's try to unpack the arguments and isolate a few different senses in which refs can be bad.
1. Individual Blown Calls
Refs make mistakes. Sometimes, as in the LSU-Bama game, they make a rules mistake. Sometimes they miss calls because they can't see the play — either because they're out of position or looking the wrong place, or because something is in their way. Sometimes they see the play clearly but still judge it incorrectly.
The judgment calls are hard, and there is enough indeterminacy in the standards for physical contact that there will always be some gray area. Some calls could go either way — call or no call, block or charge — and neither is really right or wrong. Some calls, however, are outside the gray area and objectively wrong.
2. Inconsistency
There is an equality norm in basketball: similar plays should be treated similarly. If a certain type and amount of contact is called a foul against one team, it should also be called a foul against the opposing team, and also against another team in another game.
Perfect consistency is impossible, but we should aim for as much as possible. And the WNBA, like other leagues, has an extensive system of continuing education to achieve as much consistency as possible.
3. Calls Too Loose/Calls Too Tight
Some people, like Clay Kallam and Rebkell, complain that refs in the WNBA let too much go, that the play is too physical and too ugly.
Other people, like Mike DiMauro, complain that refs in the WNBA call too much, whistling every bit of ticky-tack contact, slowing the game down to an boring crawl with frequent stoppages.
Note that these two complaints are (at least facially) contradictory, and that the WNBA probably couldn't respond to both at once. Faced with these competing gripes, it's not clear to me what the league should do.
Note also that these complaints are not really directed at the refs themselves. It is the league's job (as legislator) to write the rule book and to decide how tightly or loosely contact should be called. It is the refs' job (as judges and police) to enforce the league's directive consistently.
Those are some of the complaints that are leveled at WNBA refs. Tomorrow we'll talk more about whether WNBA refs are really worse than other basketball refs.
The complaints have been around for years. Of course, fans (and coaches and players and writers) in every sport complain about the officiating, and it's possible that our complaints are just another manifestation of a universal (and banal) feature of sports psychology.
Still, given the frequency of the complaints — and given that they often come from some of the game's biggest advocates and most respected observers — it's worth examining the issue in a serious and systematic way. Is the officiating in women's basketball really bad? If so, what is the reason, and what can be done about it?
My own preliminary view is that reffing in women's basketball isn't quite as good as we'd like it to be, but the deficiencies are mostly the result of inevitable financial and other constraints.
I also believe, first and foremost, that reffing basketball is just really damn hard.
Enforcing rules in any system can be difficult. There are some crystalline bright-line rules whose application is clear, but there are also some muddy interpretive standards that don't produce clear results.
The Constitution, for example, says that no person can be President "who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years." That's a bright-line rule. Everyone agrees what it means, and it's easy to apply.
Other provisions are less easy, such as the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. Reasonableness is a vague interpretive standard. People disagree about what is reasonable in different contexts, and it's therefore not always clear how to apply the Fourth Amendment to concrete circumstances. (That's why criticism that judges should "just enforce the Constitution as it is written" are so appallingly stupid.)
Some basketball rules are easy. E.g.: a player can't go out of bounds with the ball. We all know what that rule means, and it's relatively easy to enforce.
The great difficulty in basketball officiating comes in interpreting and applying the rules regarding physical contact between opposing players. The governing concepts — whether a player gains an advatage, whether contact is incidental, whether a player has legal defensive position, whether a player initiated contact (when both are moving), etc. — are vague. The interpretive standards are difficult to understand, and even more difficult to apply in the course of a fast-moving game.
The difficulty, moreover, is omnipresent in the game, because opposing players are constantly making physical contact with one another all over the court.
With that in mind, let's try to unpack the arguments and isolate a few different senses in which refs can be bad.
1. Individual Blown Calls
Refs make mistakes. Sometimes, as in the LSU-Bama game, they make a rules mistake. Sometimes they miss calls because they can't see the play — either because they're out of position or looking the wrong place, or because something is in their way. Sometimes they see the play clearly but still judge it incorrectly.
The judgment calls are hard, and there is enough indeterminacy in the standards for physical contact that there will always be some gray area. Some calls could go either way — call or no call, block or charge — and neither is really right or wrong. Some calls, however, are outside the gray area and objectively wrong.
2. Inconsistency
There is an equality norm in basketball: similar plays should be treated similarly. If a certain type and amount of contact is called a foul against one team, it should also be called a foul against the opposing team, and also against another team in another game.
Perfect consistency is impossible, but we should aim for as much as possible. And the WNBA, like other leagues, has an extensive system of continuing education to achieve as much consistency as possible.
3. Calls Too Loose/Calls Too Tight
Some people, like Clay Kallam and Rebkell, complain that refs in the WNBA let too much go, that the play is too physical and too ugly.
Other people, like Mike DiMauro, complain that refs in the WNBA call too much, whistling every bit of ticky-tack contact, slowing the game down to an boring crawl with frequent stoppages.
Note that these two complaints are (at least facially) contradictory, and that the WNBA probably couldn't respond to both at once. Faced with these competing gripes, it's not clear to me what the league should do.
Note also that these complaints are not really directed at the refs themselves. It is the league's job (as legislator) to write the rule book and to decide how tightly or loosely contact should be called. It is the refs' job (as judges and police) to enforce the league's directive consistently.
Those are some of the complaints that are leveled at WNBA refs. Tomorrow we'll talk more about whether WNBA refs are really worse than other basketball refs.
posted by Ted at 9:54 AM
