There is power in a union

After a relatively quiet summer off-season in the NBA, two big bits of news came in over the last week.

First, the league officially announced on Friday – after unofficially looking the other way since the days of Bob Cousy, short shorts, and fundamentals – that a “player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may take two steps in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” This after a March story on ESPN.com in which Joe Borgia, the league’s vice president of referee operations,  admitted that when it comes to the one-step traveling rule, referees “really don’t reference the rulebook.”

Then, on Tuesday, word came down that negotiators for the league and its referee’s union had reached an agreement on a new contract. If the contract is ratified by a majority of the union’s 57 referees at a vote scheduled for Friday, the men in black and white will be back at work in time for the beginning of the regular season, ending a lockout that began in mid-September.

Coincidence, you think? Arbitrary confluence of unrelated events? Maybe. But then again …

Up until yesterday, the negotiations between the league and the referee’s union had been a complete disaster, with the refs looking for pay raises and increases in severance and pensions and the league looking to give them nothing of the sort. In early April NBA commissioner David Stern pulled out of talks after he and the union’s chief negotiator exchanged insults through the media, and since then the whole thing has been in the hands of lawyers.

Preseason games, meanwhile, went ahead as planned, with replacement refs from the WNBA and the NBA’s Development league scaring the wits out players and coaches and making them long for the good old ways when they knew the names of the people they were screaming at.

But the real season is about to begin, and since both sides have a vested interest in everyone getting back to work (Stern doesn’t need the hassle that will come with inexperienced refs clashing with cranky NBA coaches, and the refs themselves have already missed two paychecks), it makes sense that a deal has been reached.

But what if the change in the two-step rule wasn’t just an arbitrarily timed decision made by league officials but rather a perfectly timed demand by the referee’s union to get themselves back on the court with dignity? What if it was being used as leverage this whole time?

Think about it: You have a rule that no players follow and no referees enforce but the breaking of which drives old-school fans and opposing coaches to distraction. Every time an NBA poster-child like Dwyane Wade or LeBron James is caught on tape taking extra steps on the way to the basket and getting away with it, fans and opponents scream up and down that the league has two sets of rules: one for superstars, one for mere mortals. And who do they scream at? The refs, of course. Never mind that basketball players are so quick and so athletic these days that it’s hard to tell if they’re traveling even in slow-motion replays; never mind that refs are only human and that they’re trying their best to see through a wall of impossibly muscular bodies in order to make calls; never mind, even, that these refs have been told by their bosses not to call players with traveling if they take an extra step. Never mind any of it; when a fan or a coach or a player or a sports writer sees an injustice, he is going to turn his wrath on the man with the whistle in his hand (and not in his mouth).

And who needs that? The one-step travel rule/non-rule was little more than a bludgeon to beats refs’ heads in with, leaving the men and women in black and white in an impossible situation: make the call and face the fury of an angry league looking to keep casual fans and sports-highlight shows interested; miss the call and face the spitting vitriol of the basketball blogosphere.

No, best to use the rule as a bargaining chip in your negotiations. Tell the league you’ll concede on pay raises and severance packages and pension plans for a few years while the economy recovers, but in return demand the league rescind a rule that was absolutely crushing you and yours on a nightly basis.

Then, two years from now, when those contracts are up again, demand that hand-checking and the three-second rule get struck from the books as well. Or out the door you’ll go.

Photo by Brian Auer via Flickr

When the players of the National Basketball Association (NBA) take the court for the first time at the end of October, current indications are that they’ll do so alongside a cast of replacement officials. As of this past Sunday, the New York Times was reporting that the list of scabs included at least two previously fired referees, 25 WNBA veterans, and 13 NBA Development League zebras: a somewhat respectable list, it would seem (at least these folks have seen time working a professional version of their sport). Still, newly-minted Cleveland Caviliers’ Center Shaquille O’Neal is skeptical. On Friday, as O’Neal came out in favor of the officials, Fanhouse’s Tim Povtak wrote, “[t]he NBA used replacement officials at the start of the 1995-96 season, and they were rounded criticized for being unable to control the games. During a particularly physical exhibition game that season, O’Neal had his right thumb fractured when he was karate chopped by Matt Geiger before he went up for a dunk.” Shaq, it seems, thinks that the NBA should grant the refs their contract requests for safety’s sake. And though he’s got a point, there’s something else that League executives should consider: Blessed with the opportunity to finally rid themselves of the unholy tyranny of officiating, the NBA should jump at this chance to let players call their own fouls.

Think about it: Street ball — with its breakneck pace, lax rules enforcement, and authentic cache — is the gritty better of its professional cousin. And really, the only thing that separates the two versions of the sport is the fact that the NBA chooses to employ officials. But the difference embodied in a man with a whistle more or less kills the rush that’s offered when he isn’t there to keep things under control. After all, aren’t refs nothing more than policy wonks with direct power, whose whole reason for being is built on excuses (okay, rules — but, really, what’s the difference?) that serve to tamp down the excitement of a game.

Take away policing and you get chaos. Fine. Really. On the court, chaos would mean an extra few steps on the way to the basket (read: more spectacular dunkage), or perhaps the leeway to get a few extra elbows in on defense. Maybe, if things go really bad, somebody breaks something. But take a closer look: Isn’t this all just the democratization of the sport of basketball? No refs means no favorites. In a world where there is most certainly a hierarchy, and little mistakes by big-name players tend to be ignored, basketball suffers from the appearance of unequal rules enforcement. In this light, the act of allowing players to call fouls on their own serves as an act of equalization — we can all rest assured that the ultra-competitiveness of what goes on during a sporting event will serve as a self-regulation: Is tit-for-tat not the best way to be totally fair?

As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the entertainment factor that goes with the end of officialdom. For starters, the NBA, sans-refs, starts to get more like street ball. More action. Quicker pace. Better game. And by making the players responsible for calling all fouls, you’re virtually ensuring plenty of major no-fucking-way-did-I-travel conversations a game. This adds a whole new dimension — that of serious debate — to the game. Imagine what this might do for the pasty library rats who play for an Ivy Legaue squad. (When you factor in education costs, one can make more money over five average years in the NBA than in the same amount of time as a Harvard/Yale/Cornell-educated Doctor/Lawyer/CEO.)

‘Course, with all of the contact — and probable catastrophic injury — all kinds of players who might have otherwise never had a shot at professional basketball would find themselves cracking rosters. And that spells perhaps the best reason to can officiating: With so much opportunity here, it’s possible that the NBA could turn into a major job source. Cash for Clunkers? Nah, this is real stimulus.

So maybe Shaq should stop whining — you know, for the good of the country.