NBA will allow coaches to throw ‘challenge flags’

The NBA Board of Governors has passed a new rule that will allow head coaches to throw a challenge flag to signal to the referee in 2019-2020.

Move over NFL, the challenge flag is now coming to the NBA.

According to The Athletic‘s Shams Charania, the NBA Board of Governors has passed a motion that will allow head coaches to throw in-game challenge flags for the 2019-2020 season.

The new rule is part of the NBA’s move to mirror the league’s NFL and MLB counterparts in allowing coaches to challenges certain calls. On the same day the NBA approved the challenge flags, the league sent out a memo that laid out the calls that coaches can challenge.

Those calls include “called fouls,” basket interference, knocked out of bounds and basket interference. A head coach will only be awarded one challenge call per game, and similar to the NFL, if a team loses a challenge, they’ll lose a timeout.

Also, a team must have at least one timeout to initiate a coaches challenge.

After the memo was sent out, there were questions as to how a coach would get the referee’s attention to call a challenge. Enter the “challenge flag,” in which a coach could throw to initiate the challenge. There is one lingering question about the challenge flag, and that’s if a coach can throw it on the baseline or on the court.

We would guess the former because throwing a flag on a court could risk injuring a player.

When word of this reached NBA Twitter, fans reacted the only way they knew how:

Yep, they memed it.

Regardless of the memes, this is a huge step in the right direction for the NBA. The league long ago needed to move away from referee-initiated challenges, and give its coaches more latitude to try to reverse a potential bad call.