New NCAA Rules Will Change Game

There have been new rules added to scholastic and collegiate basketball. These rules will have such a dramatic effect on the game that I feel it could be a change of regret by the rule makers. The intended logical reasoning behind these changes could come back and bite the designers in the face. The main rule change will affect defensive play. There will be very little contact allowed by officials. Hand checking will finally be eliminated. That’s a positive change, but the distance between the defender and the ball will be extended so foot movement will have to get better for the defender. With the street ball mentality of basketball that has become a major part of the game, actions like driving to the basket could result in more foul shots. Many of us who have coached basketball, have taught our players that when guarding an opponent make contact. By that I mean it is not necessarily physically holding the offensive player, but a sense of having a feel with the forearm (called the arm bar) and trying not to totally impair offensive movement without fouling. This is especially true when guarding the person without the ball. In reality, the offensive player always has the advantage over the defender, so the methods that were taught were simple. Keep the defender between the ball and the person they’re guarding and deny that offensive player the freedom of coming to the ball untouched — “deny the cutter.”Not any more with these so called “new rules.” Due to these new rules, be prepared for a lot of fouls, tons of free throws and long ugly games. So a message to all-scholastic coaches: Make sure your practice plans have many drills that involve shooting fouls. Don’t cut your teams to 11 players. You’re going to need plenty of backups because there might be three to six players fouling out per game — I’m serious. The other side of this is that we are basically going back to the original rules of basketball by moving back to an athletic game versus a physical game. That’s what I mean by the so called “new rules” — they are actually old school. When I was a kid, I remember when some referees would call touch fouls. Those games became press worthy and resulted in bashing of the officials. What all this will do is change the teaching techniques of how to play defense, especially when it comes to defending the screen, the post and the drive. The old basketball expression of “mugging,” used by coaches to describe extremely physical defense, will no longer be said when complaining about the physical defense away from the ball. The refs will be watching play away from the ball, using more discretion. It is my opinion that the art of playing an in-your-face man-to-man defense will become one of basketball’s artifacts. What are college coaches saying across the nation? Kansas basketball coach Bill Self said, “The teams that can guard the ball are going to be the ones that can separate themselves because it’s going to be hard to guard the ball because the rules won’t allow it. I don’t understand how you can have no contact. I don’t understand that.” Kentucky coach John Calipari said, “If you want to press and hold and bump, you’re going to foul out your whole team.” West Virginia coach Bob Huggins added, “They don’t want a great 57-52 game — hard played, competitive. They want an 86-82 game. Do they want to watch that garbage for four and a half hours? Do they want to do that by shooting 70 free throws? People don’t want to watch free-throw shooting contests.” “Some of the guys I have talked to around the country, friends of mine, former assistants, have been paranoid about it because they played games where there were 70, 80, 90 free throws being shot. And that’s a little scary. But I think it will balance out,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. But Oklahoma State coach Travis Ford calls the new rules the game’s biggest change since the three-point arc. His team began adjusting immediately and regularly performed drills that emphasize playing great defense without placing hands on the offensive player. “We are not taking the approach, OK let’s forget defense,” Ford said. “And I think they kind of want us to do that. I think that’s what they want us to do a little bit.” The one thing about this rule change for we New Yorkers to be happy about, or should I say Syracuse fans, is that Jim Boeheim is the happiest man in America because his reliance on the zone has just become paramount. It will be an interesting basketball season for the fans, not to mention the coaches and teams, to see how this all works out. I’m just glad I am not a basketball official.