Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has contributed $100,000 to Southern Methodist University for scientific research on flopping, something that has caught the attention of Mavs star Dirk Nowitzki.
Dirk Nowitzki: Flopping won’t go away, but we need to ‘limit’ it
Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki doesn’t have a problem with a little extra selling of fouls, but he believes that blatant flopping needs to be eliminated from the game.
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
Nowitzki told Eddie Sefko of The Dallas Morning News that he endorses selling calls to draw fouls, but he also believes that blatant flops need to be eliminated from the game:
“We’re never going to get rid of it,” he said recently. “But you got to limit it. It’s part of sports. It’s part of winning. Some people are smart and do a little extra thing to kind of sell the call. To me, that’s part of sports.
“You don’t want the obvious ones, the really, really bad ones. I think we’d love to get rid of those.”
Chris Bosh provided a good example of an "obvious" flop in Game 4 of the NBA Finals -- earning himself a $5,000 fine on a play where he flailed his arms and went flying to the floor despite the fact that Tim Duncan made minimal contact with him. Nowitzki says he's not a fan at all of those types of "soccer flops" and that they need to go.
The problem right now is that the $5,000 fine isn’t a big enough penalty to stop players from executing such blatant flops. If there were harsher fines, that may limit the excess flopping. On the other hand, perhaps the SMU study will help NBA officials make it easier to differentiate between a “foul” and a “flop.”
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