The NBA needed to kill intentional fouling, and it didn’t

The NBA had one job this summer. That the league had just one major task speaks to how well the NBA is run. This is an organization that in recent years has pushed the envelope on what a major American sports league can be, and Adam Silver has by and large been a huge success as commissioner. Any outstanding concerns about parity and the league’s salary structure have been caused by the NBA’s overwhelming success in growing revenue. The adjustments that will bring those issues to heel will come in future labor negotiations.

In the immediate term, among things that Silver could guide real change right now, there was just one task: end intentional fouling. Once an annoyance that plagued the viewers of few teams, the strategy’s usage has exploded over the past two seasons. Kevin Pelton has tracked the growth of intentional fouling as a strategy; it got completely out of hand this season. It was so bad at times that even Silver moved significantly on the issue.

Prior to this season, Silver indicated he didn’t see it as a very serious issue. He changed his tone around the question by the end of 2015-16. And so the league’s Competition Committee and Board of Governors took up reform in recent weeks. And on Tuesday, Silver announced ... a half-measure that will decrease intentional fouling by about half but leave it alive to plague our games.

What the NBA agreed to do: extend current rules penalizing intentional fouls in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter and overtime to the final two minutes of all quarters. The league claims this will reduce intentional fouling by an estimated 45 percent.

Of course, the league could have extended those rules that are good enough for the final two minutes of the game to the other 46 minutes and reduced intentional fouling by 100 percent. Instead, the strategy remains alive. Instead, atrocities like what J.B. Bickerstaff did to Andre Drummond and the Pistons can occur. In that January game, the Rockets fouled Drummond 12 straight times to start the third quarter in order to convince Stan Van Gundy to take him out of the game. The NBA’s just-announced rule change wouldn’t prevent that. In fact, the league has implicitly condoned it by refusing to sanction such strategies in the rule change. The NBA tweaked rules around intentional fouling and left in place a system where it is accepted basketball strategy to foul a player off the ball 12 straight times at the beginning of a quarter.

Of course, teams regularly hacked the hell out of Houston to get Dwight Howard on the line. (They’ll do it even more frequently to atrocious free throw shooter and Howard replacement Clint Capela next season.) I’ve got friends in Atlanta who can expect to see Howard clank scores of free throws next year. (Perhaps literally scores in one game: Howard has twice taken 39 free throws in a game.) The Clippers will see it, too. Andrew Bogut will get his clanks in down in Dallas. One of the more troubling aspects of intentional fouling’s growth as a strategy last season was the expansion of the permissible pool of players worthy of being hacked. NBA coaches have expanded the potential victims of the strategy beyond norms: we’ve got Rajon Rondo, Andre Iguodala and Josh Smith being hacked. It’s more pervasive not just in brazenness toward the worst shooters, but in terms of its reach.

A half-measure wasn’t needed here. There is no inherent value in the strategy to intentionally foul bad free throw shooters off the ball. It’s not good basketball. It’s not entertaining. It doesn’t do anything to teach children to practice their free throws. (More likely, it erodes a sense of empathy in the athletes who struggle to hit their free throws despite hours of practice. Does ridiculing an athlete who struggles in moments of high pressure do anything for kids who struggle to perform well on tests?) We watch basketball for the amazing athletic feats, for the beauty of the game, to stoke and subsume our passions. Not to watch large men fail at seemingly simple tasks. If we wanted to do that, we’d go watch rec league basketball.

This is a problem that is easily fixed, and a problem the NBA is strangely unwilling to end. Silver works for the NBA owners, and so it is only their will he can fulfill. But someone is dropping the ball on this issue, whether it be the commissioner or the owners. These rule changes are disappointingly limited, and so we face another season with hacking galore. It really, really doesn’t have to be this way.

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