NBA Says Referee Errors Are Down Amid Growing Complaints From Coaches and Players
On Wednesday, less than an hour after being ejected from a game his team was trailing, Los Angeles Clippers coach Tyronn Lue raced out of the locker room to celebrate a come-from-behind win. As he exited, he had a few more choice words for the referees who sent him there.
“Where the refs at now?” Lue shouted. “Cheating ass, that’s all they’ve been doing.”
Lue’s outburst—video of which quickly went viral—was the latest pointed criticism of NBA officiating. It also earned him a $35,000 fine, the league announced Friday. Last month, Toronto Raptors coach Darko Rajaković, unhappy about a wide free throw disparity between the Raptors and Los Angeles Lakers, unleashed a fiery, two-minute rant toward the referees. Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown brought a laptop to a postgame news conference to illustrate a blown call. Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards called the officiating “terrible” after a win.
Lue vocally criticized officials after he was ejected in Wednesday’s game.
John Hefti/USA TODAY Sports
Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s Senior Vice President of Referee Development and Training, acknowledged in an interview with Sports Illustrated that some of the criticism has been sharper. “I think that’s true, in general,” McCutchen says. But he notes that scrutiny of refereeing has heightened across all sports. And that not all of the critiques are accurate.
“I think one of the important factors in leadership is trying to delineate between the criticism that has true merit and what is part of a perception issue,” McCutchen says. “You can’t attack the things you need to attack if you’re not good at separating out what’s just perception and narrative and what is actually factual.”
“Errors are down. … About an error per game,” he says, citing the NBA’s independent grading group (the NBA does not share referee data). Free throw attempts are down slightly. Fouls, too. Scoring has ticked up this season, but McCutchen insists that’s more about the evolution of the game than the way it is being officiated.
“It’s how teams are playing,” McCutchen says. “They’re playing very efficiently, they’re playing smart basketball. Through the coaching and the analytic information, they’ve become much more in tuned to what is good basketball.”
The most oft-criticized whistles are judgment calls. How referees call “verticality,” a defense Roy Hibbert made famous more than a decade ago, has drawn questions, as have “pathway plays,” where a referee must decide if a defender is in a legal position when there is contact.
“Merely having your hands up does not turn the play into a verticality play,” McCutchen says. “A verticality play is about getting to a spot first and then having the rights vertically to that space. It’s often then a positional play, meaning you get to a spot first and then you await the offensive player coming to you and you have vertical rights. They can be jumping or they can be standing still. Often though, what we see misconstrued as a verticality play is someone running alongside someone with their hands up. That’s not it.”
Contact, McCutchen says, does not mean a foul. Edwards’s frustration came after getting no whistle on a late drive against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Replay appeared to show Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hitting Edwards’s arm as he went to the rim. In the NBA’s Last Two Minute Report—a public evaluation of the calls made in the final two minutes of every game—the contact was ruled “marginal” and the non-call correct.
McCutchen stands by that decision. “Basketball is a contact sport,” McCutchen says. “The difference is, of course, the difference between legal and illegal contact.” When assessing contact, referees use four criteria: speed, quickness, rhythm and balance, or SQRB. When deciding whether to blow the whistle, referees evaluate whether the SQRB is affected. In the case of Edwards, McCutchen says, it wasn’t.
“If Anthony was going up with two hands for a layup and we see some contact, but there’s no hitch, there’s no rhythm, you just power on through, we think that that’s the appropriate balance,” McCutchen says. “We do have defensive players who are inclined to contest at the rim, which we know is great basketball.”
For more than two decades, the NBA has tweaked its rules to make the game more free-flowing. It took out hand checking and curbed the physicality. It’s also adapted to eliminate some of the ways offensive players manipulate it. Making the swim move, where a player creates contact by going into a shooting motion while under the arms of a defender, no longer results in free throws. Offensive players jumping into defenders is no longer a defensive foul.
McCutchen says he is open to even more changes. “Some of these plays where someone has sealed the offensive player appropriately and we give in to the offensive player’s desire to create that impression of a foul, we’re working on that,” McCutchen says. As the game evolves, he says, so should the way it is refereed.
“What do we want with this new evolution of the game?” McCutchen asks. “I think that’s some of the criticism we’re seeing is that the question has come up, then are the current rules serving the game in the proper way? That’s the reason we have a competition committee so that governors, players, coaches, general managers and the league office can get into viable, authentic discussion about what are the best rules to serve the game that has evolved to this point today, in 2024. We’re actively in those discussions.”
Beyond how the game is called, interactions with players and coaches have come under scrutiny. Before getting ejected Wednesday, Lue had several tense exchanges with James Williams, a veteran referee. “James deserves to be suspended for how he talked to Tyronn,” said a source who overheard the discussions. Leaving the locker room, Lue yelled, “Where James at? I wanna kiss him in the mouth.”
In November, Chris Paul and referee Scott Foster continued an ongoing feud when Foster ejected Paul from a game against the Phoenix Suns. Paul said the dispute was personal, referencing a situation he says occurred between Foster and his son. In December, NBA commissioner Adam Silver weighed in, saying, “whatever the bad blood is between you two, you don’t have to be friends, but you both have to go out and do your jobs.”
Paul alongside Foster during the Warriors’ game against the Suns on Nov. 22, 2023.
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports
Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers believes some of the conflict stems from the influx of new referees.
“It’s an extremely hard game to officiate, our league,” Rivers says. “And the second part of that is we have a turnover of a lot of veteran officials leaving over the last couple years. We have a lot of young officials. Some of the young officials, to me, are doing their best to show that they are capable and by doing that there are techs. It’s definitely something that a lot of people in the coaching industry are talking about.”
McCutchen says he has no issues with how referees conduct themselves, including Foster. He says he is comfortable with Foster, who consistently grades out as one of the NBA’s top officials, officiating games Paul plays in. If he wasn’t, Foster wouldn’t just be off Paul’s games. He would be off the job.
“If any referee, Scott or any other referee on our staff can’t be trusted to referee a single player or a single team, that wouldn’t be cause to not have them referee that single player or that team,” McCutchen says. “That would be cause for firing someone. If someone is not capable of integrity, which Scott most certainly is, but if someone we find out can’t be trusted in their integrity with one player, then they can’t be trusted to serve this league.
“And that’s indicative of any referee on our staff. Anyone that I am working with in this role that I can’t trust to put on any game or any player, then they don’t need to be on the staff because that is at the heart of integrity. That’s the thing about integrity. You can never have 94% integrity. Once you sell it the first time, integrity and its totality is gone. And so we make sure that we’re really on top of all the analytical data that would suggest bias.”
There is always, McCutchen says, room for improvement.
“Referees serve the game,” McCutchen says. “The game is going to evolve and referees have to keep up with that evolution.”
