For sports fans, there are few things worse in sports than sitting down to watch an important basketball game and pining it down for the first few minutes because the star player gets in bad shape. It usually takes a quarter to see how tightly the umpires are to call things, and by the time that process works itself out, the pivot player can be sticking to the bench for the rest of the first half.
After Iowa lost several players to trouble early in the NCAA women’s game, there were several articles calling for an end to the fault. There is some merit to this idea, but you can’t help but wonder how some of the more physical teams or players in the league would play if they could make as many fouls as they wanted without any consequences. There must be a middle ground.
Is there a solution to the error problem?
One idea is that any time a player commits two fouls in a quarter, he has to walk away for the rest of that quarter. The next quarter begins, however, with a clean slate. In theory, this means that the most aggressive players in the league can commit up to eight fouls in a game. It could also mean that a player could commit two fouls as early as the fourth quarter and not be available for a clutch moment of the game, no matter how many fouls he committed in the first three quarters.
So there are pros and cons to this idea. You can tweak it and allow three errors in the fourth quarter, but that kind of tweak always seems to lead to some kind of dire scenario that we can’t anticipate. But the idea of players having to sit after two fouls a quarter would be a payback to the endless fouling that happens in the final minutes of most games because you can only make so many fouls before you start losing players.
The solution could be to only allow coaches to stay on the field. How many times have we seen star players lose more time in the first half than they would have missed if they had played through the foul problem, even if they were fouled at some point in the second half? In that women’s title game, for example, it turned out that Kaitlyn Clark lasted 35 minutes for Iowa and made no mistakes. In Clark’s case, she clearly offers enough offensive value that it makes sense to let her be careful on defense, even if it means surrendering a few extra baskets.
Coaches may be the key to solving the problem.
If you feel like coaches are overreacting to players for two fouls, say, in the first quarter, you might be on to something. In the entire NBA this season, there have been a total of 282 foul disqualifications. That’s an average of nine players per team, or about one player every nine games. Only 56 players in the entire league have fouled more than twice this season, but those 56 account for nearly half of the DQs for the entire league.
Which should tell you that most players can handle a little more leeway. For example, Jalen Brunson missed most of the first quarter of Game 1 of the Knicks series against Cleveland because he committed two fouls early on. As a result, he had only eight points in the first half. But, after the break, he lost the match, and ended up with 27 in the match.
What’s more, he only made one more mistake. Obviously, the Knicks need Bronson to be on the ground as often as possible, and if this happens again, they should trust him to be careful so they can get the most out of scoring him as much as possible.
The bottom line is that there are men who are prone to error, but when a coach takes them off the ground we have to ask what he’s saving them for. Are they so necessary at the end of the game that you have to keep them on the bench for twice the time in the first half? How often does it turn out that by saving them at the end of the game you end up with the game already decided by then?