Basketball is not a good sport
Basketball refereeing/officiating is objectively poor and it has been ruining the game for decades, more specifically its biggest market, the NBA.
Introduction
Let’s start off with some information. I will be talking specifically about the NBA, for multiple reasons. The first being the fact that the entire NBA is worth around $138.000.000.000 dollars1 (138 Billion dollars), it is BY FAR the biggest market in basketball, by a very large margin. There is absolutely no room for the “lack of funds” argument.
The second reason is the fact that the NBA affects every other basketball league in the world, every single basketball player in ROTW (Rest of the world) plays basketball in hopes to one day earn an NBA contract that will yield them millions of dollars. This comes as no surprise, as the minimum salary for an NBA player with absolutely zero NBA experience for the year 2025 is $1.272.8692, an insane 84.4x (8440%) increase over the minimum US full-time wage ($15.080 yearly with normal working hours assumptions on the $7.253 hourly minimum wage). This percentage increases above ten thousand percent and a multiplier of 100x if we include the fact that the NBA off-season lasts around 20 weeks (5 full months!) from the end of NBA finals to the start of the next regular season. This year the finals land at earliest on June 13th4 (if a team sweeps 4-0) and at latest June 22nd4 (if game 7 of the finals is forced). Last year the NBA preseason ended on October 18th4, meaning the players got at least 4 months of “rest” (obviously they still have to stay in at least reasonable shape, hence the rest part is in quotation marks).
This time period increases even further if the player’s team does not make the playoffs. With all these incentives, we can see why the NBA is the dream destination for every aspiring basketball player.
Missed Calls
Now we are going to dive straight into the biggest issue, missed calls. This issue has ruined not tens, not hundreds but THOUSANDS of NBA games. Most missed calls have been forgotten in history, the vast majority of the ones that stay remembered in the minds of fans are 4th Quarter calls, and even then mostly playoffs games get remembered. But the reality is that a singular regular-season call in a seemingly non-important game can alter the course of an entire NBA post-season by that one game potentially affecting the seeding and flipping the scales of the home court advantage and/or completely changing the playoffs brackets and matchups.
Today I watched a couple of playoffs games and one missed call stood out to me. Let’s take a look at the clip below together:
Excuse me for the clip being poor quality, but the NBA’s extreme crackdown on any clips has been a pest to the basketball community this year, I don’t see why they do it as it brings an insane amount of attention to their league. If you can’t see it in the clip, the player taking the 3 point shot is obviously fouled by being shoved and altering the shooter’s shot in the process. But there is no foul call. No free throws for the shooter. There is an argument around the NBA alleging that the playoffs are “more physical” and that the referees are more tight with their calls in playoffs, which is stupid in my opinion, there should be no difference in treatment of fouls no matter the importance of a game. All games should have equal treatment and should have a team of personnel reviewing the fouls in a designated control room like the VAR system in football (for the Americans reading this - soccer). The shooter’s coach reacted to the no-call:
Obviously the coach is incredibly frustrated, because his team was robbed of an opportunity to tie the series 2-2, but instead - under the subjective opinion of the referees - they are down 1-3. If this call had been reviewed by a designated control room of highly trained refereeing officials the call would have been far more objective and far more fair, this system of refereeing is incredibly unfair to everyone - the players, the referees that get abused for making these difficult decisions with limited time and limited resources, and most importantly the fans.
NBA Ratings
Bad refereeing is also a crucial factor in the fact that the NBA ratings are decreasing and viewership numbers falling.5
Solution
Everything I say from here onwards is purely my opinion and could be absolute rubbish. With that out of the way, let’s get started!
I believe the referees on-court should be making absolutely no decisions. They should be able to transmit what they saw and give their opinion to the designated control room of highly trained referees, but the control room should make the final decisions and the on-court referee should be merely a messenger of the final decision on plays. The NBA absolutely has the money for teams of at least 10 personnel that would make these decisions in real-time for each NBA game.