Report: NBA D-League to Experiment with Coach's Challenges
The NBA D-League is more than a proving ground for players, coaches and officials to show that they belong on basketball's biggest stage.
It's also quickly becoming an experimental platform for the big league, a place to test out new ideas and implement them into game situations to see how that might fare at the highest level.
Gino Pilato of D-League Digest shared the particulars of the most recent innovation for the 2014-15 season:
"According to sources, coaches will receive one challenge in regulation, if the challenge is successful the team will be allowed an additional challenge with a maximum of two challenges. Teams will also be granted one challenge in each overtime period, and if successful will be issued another challenge, once again with a maximum of two challenges. It is also important to note that there will be no carry-over of any unused challenge.
Furthermore, coaches will need to call a timeout (full or 30 second) to challenge then 'twirl their finger' to indicate the challenge. Plays that can be challenged include personal fouls, but not flopping calls. Technical fouls can’t be challenged as well.
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If a timeout and a twirl is enough to get a call correct, this is absolutely an idea worth exploring.
This also is not a new idea for the league. Former commissioner David Stern said in 2011 that the NBA had been considering this option.
"We might have one person whose job it is to keep the headphones on and always watch," Stern said, per Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News. "And you might let a coach throw the flag in the last two minutes. We're striving for accuracy."
Of course, there are obvious kinks to a replay system potentially expanding to include such subjective calls like personal fouls. Even with a video in hand, determining the amount of contact isn't as clear-cut as say figuring out whether an NFL player is down before losing control of the ball.
So, it makes sense to want to see the action in practice without actually putting it into practice. And if the league finds these calls can be objectively made after video review, the NBA will have found yet another way to give its fans a better product and its players a better system to eliminate the element of human error.
Expanded replay review is nothing new for the NBA. The league's board of governors approved a series of replay changes prior to the start of this season, including allowing officials to check whether a flagrant foul or a clear-path foul occurred without needing the violation to have been originally deemed as such.
But with any talk of increasing the use of replay, there is always one primary concern.
"The obvious hang-up is slowing the game," wrote NBC Sports' Dan Feldman. "More reviews take time, and the NBA is already trying to decrease the length of its game. If letting coaches challenge fouls is going to work, the reviews must happen quickly. This experiment in the D-League should help determine what's viable."
It's hard to overstate the importance of the time aspect here. Remember, the NBA tested out a 44-minute clock during the preseason, something USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt speculated the league may try out again "next preseason and in the D-League."
If there are efforts in place to speed things up, these challenges cannot go in the opposite direction. Implementing this change in the D-League will allow NBA officials to see just how long these reviews will take.
It may be a bit choppy at first, but it's possible this could be streamlined into a relatively smooth process. Referees know what they are looking for when they make foul calls on the floor, and this could give them an even better glimpse of the action.
What could be even more interesting to see is how and when coaches choose to use their challenges. With no guarantee of having a second one available, coaches may bypass an early opportunity to save it for later in the game. Then again, points hold the same impact whenever they are scored, so it might be best to take advantage of that option at the first real opportunity.
There are so many layers of this to unravel, a task the NBA has wisely put into the hands of the D-League. If the challenges have a great enough impact at this stage, they could have their own NBA call-up sooner than later.
