A Heated Debate

Ryan Wilson over at Heels, Sox & Steelers has quite an argument going with Dan Lewis of ArmchairGM.com. The subject of discussion is the "intentional foul (intentional' in the plain-English, non-NBA rules sense) in the last minute, used by the trailing team to stop the clock."

My first impression is to side with Ryan; fouling in the last minute is a strategic decision, not a rule-breaking action. But my second thought, upon further analysis, is that Ryan and Dan are "like two ships passing in the night." They're talking about the same subject, but they're coming at it from different perspectives.

Ryan considers whether or not intentional fouls in a game's closing minutes violate the spirit of a rule, whereas Dan argues Georgia Tech purposefully fouling Connecticut at the end of the NCAA Championship game would not violate the letter of the law.

Consider Dan's orientation:

In a recent post to his weblog, he [Mark Cuban] asks a prescient question: "if [a player] is dribbling up court and a defender just steps in front of him, all for the sole point of taking a charge?" Cuban uses the question as a jumping-off point to make his case for a change to the NBA rules, in essence, by pointing out that players should not be able to intend to take a charge.

But Cuban didn't identify the disease, merely a symptom. Charges occur when the offensive player violates the rules; therefore, we compensate the victim. Cuban rightly points out that by giving defenders incentive to step into a shot, we're therefore not making the charge worthy of compensation, and, it'd be better to punish the defenders (who is truly causing the problem).

It's the contrapositive of this postulate that is the real issue. Fouls are violations of the rules, and therefore, should offer no strategic benefit. But often, they do.

The most obvious example is the intentional foul in the last minute, used by the trailing team to stop the clock. The leading team needs to have good free throw shooters in the game in order to effectively counter this strategy, but that outcome is beyond silly. Here you have the trailing team breaking the rules, and instead of the leading team getting some benefit from this violation, the leading team in many cases is at a stark disadvantage.

Ryan adopts a different view, taking issue with this notion of advantage and disadvantage and suggesting Dan's assumptions about a club's priorities are off-target.

What Dan overlooks is that when trailing teams foul in the waning minutes of a game they do so primarily to stop the clock and secondarily in the hopes that the fouled team misses the free throws. If the fouled team converts their free throws it's not a net gain for the trailing team. They foul in the last few minutes because they have to. Their primary goal is to stop the clock and then make up the points their next time down the court.

With their different perspectives in mind, it is no surprise that the two have come to disagree about the example in question. Dan sees Connecticut's potential decision to remove poor-shooting point guard Taliek Brown from the game in the closing minutes as a symptom of philosophical rule-breaking, whereas Ryan understands and supports the move as a practical and strategic decision within an existing set (of perhaps conceptually unsound) rules.