Depending On How Well The First Challenge Goes, NBA Coaches May Soon Receive A Second One

According to the league, coaches in the NBA may soon be able to contest two calls in a game rather of just one.

Coaches are now allowed one challenge every game, whether they are correct or not. If the initial challenge is considered successful, the league’s competition committee is debating giving coaches a second option to utilize it later in the game.

Depending On How Well The First Challenge Goes, NBA Coaches May Soon Receive A Second One

The proposal will be further explored during Thursday’s meeting with the NBA competition committee, according to Byron Spruell, president of basketball operations for the league.

“We’re absolutely looking at it,” Spruell said during ESPN’s “NBA Today” on Wednesday. “The competition committee over the summer will review it. It’s still a process. We have to get it through a board [of governors] vote over the summer, test it as well, but we feel like it’s an incremental movement that we would potentially like to see.”

At its meeting on Thursday in Miami, the NBA competition committee will go through the issue in more detail. Before being formally adopted, it would then need to go before the Board of Governors of the league and be tested during summer league.

“I think that would be good,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said before Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday, though he noted that he doesn’t know what the “unintended consequences” of such a change would be.

There is currently a restriction of one challenge per game for coaches. The timeout that was utilized to start the review is kept by the team after a successful challenge. Even when a call is obviously incorrect, coaches often hold off on challenging it until the last moments of a game because they want to have that option available.

The coaches’ challenge was implemented by the league in 2019–20, giving the head coach the ability to request an instant replay review of a personal foul assessed to his team, an out-of-bounds infraction, or a goaltending or basket interference violation.

The league is also considering how to use technology more effectively for some judgments, including late-game goaltending and out-of-bounds rulings. Any changes there would also  have to get board approval and go through the traditional testing process before getting to the NBA.

On the ESPN interview, Spruell remarked, “Now, maybe those even become more automated over time, like you see in tennis, like you see in baseball, like you even see in soccer.” “So, we’re excited by the innovation there and what it could potentially lead to, including for our referees,” the statement said, “taking that focus off of those objective calls and letting them get to the more complex, more real-time, and more judgment-type, subjective calls too, even shifting their focus.”

 

 

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