Barnstorming: Draymond Green and basketball plays

For the basketball world, most of yesterday was an agonizing wait to see if Draymond Green would be suspended for his Game 3 flagrant foul on Stevens Adams. Arguing the finer points of the play — kick or flail, intentional or accidental — was just a way to pass the time. There were at least a dozen subjective interpretations but the only one that mattered was the one that would be passed down from the league office.

In the end, Green’s foul was upgraded to a Flagrant 2 which comes with a $25,000 fine. He will be free to play in Game 4, although an additional postseason flagrant foul will put him over the limit and trigger a one-game suspension. Conflict resolved. Integrity of the game preserved.

If the Oklahoma City Thunder end up losing this series it will be for hundreds of reasons, missed shots, missed rotations, tactical errors, dumb luck. This moment in time, Green avoiding a suspension for Game 4, will undoubtedly be the one that lingers, the pea under the mattress, so to speak. The same would have been true for the Warriors if Green had been suspended and they had gone on to lose the series. The mental friction of having lost (or not lost) a key player for a key game because of a subjective interpretation of physical contact is real, regardless of which fan base it settles upon.

Fans and organizations can usually come to grips with losing because of a basketball play, however improbable. A buzzer beater, missed or made, a stunning blocked shot, a mindless turnover; however grating or joyous those circumstances might be at the time, we understand them as part of the basic fabric of a basketball game. Those things happen.

What is often less irreconcilable is when the fate of a player or team is decided by something that is only tangentially basketball. Dwell on it too long and it becomes almost physically uncomfortable that Steve Nash might have won a championship if not for a letter-of-the-law-spirit-be-damned interpretation of the rules about players leaving the bench during an altercation. Especially when that interpretation has not been consistently applied.

At their best, referees are invisible. Their noise and motion is the briefest of interruptions, quickly validating an obvious and objective assessment of reality. There are moments, however, where they are called on to do more than validate. In the introduction to his book, Ball Don’t Lie: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball, Yago Colas talks about the ways in which referees and the league structures behind them are empowered to define reality on a basketball court.

"Physical contact is merely physical contact and is neither legal nor illegal until the referee makes it illegal by blowing the whistle. In this way, the whistle augurs–like royal fanfare, but more shrill and less thrilling–the referee’s power to bring the rules to bear on the players playing the game. Considering that those rules are backed by the hierarchical administrative structure and authority of the NBA (to fine or suspend players for example), then whenever the referee blows his whistle to call a foul, he brings not only the rules but also their entire supporting structures to bear on the players and the game they are playing."

The NBA rulebook is not specific enough as to deal with the precise way that Green’s leg flew forward, or the specific nature of its contact with Adam’s groin. Judgement is not just implied, it is required. Green’s flail (or kick, or whatever) was a Flagrant 1 because it was called that way by a referee empowered to define that reality. On their face, the intention of all the structures of review and refinement, the ones we spent all of yesterday waiting to be completed, are to ensure that the judgement made on the court was correct. The problem is that there is no correct or incorrect, only subjectivity. Only judgement.

This is the way the league works. Whether or not this apparatus of judgement is actually required for basketball games to be played fairly is another question entirely (and one for which I’d encourage you read Colas’ book to think more about). This system was designed with the most benign of intentions (sorry, conspiracy theorists) — to get things right as opposed to exerting control. And all things considered, I would posit that it functions pretty well, within the framework of possibilities.

Frustration with this system usually manifests in an outcry of victimhood, those fans or organizations who feel like they have been wronged with the direction of a judgement. But I think the underlying frustration is something different — it is the discomfort with this entire apparatus of judgement being inserted into the fabric of a basketball game, getting wedged in between all the shots and blocks and rebounds and turnovers.

Everyone wants basketball games to be decided by basketball plays. When it appears that something else is deciding them, the ground shifts under our feet and the universe falls out of balance.

It may turn out that Green’s non-suspension is not a deciding factor in the outcome of this series. Perhaps we will be saved by another inarguable timeline — Oklahoma City winning anyway, or a series of basketball plays that are viscerally gripping enough to pull us away from press releases from the league office. The apparatus of judgement will retreat into the background, waiting behind the curtain until it is called upon again to tell us what is, what is not, and what is to be argued about on Twitter.