Muy Beno: Quibbling Over Tenths of a Second

Denver beat Chicago 90-89 tonight after Brad Miller's last-second shot was (correctly) deemed to have left his hand a split-second after the horn. Miller sank a long two after catching an inbounds pass with three-tenths of a second left on the clock, but my argument with the referees and how these situations are handled in general actually starts with the play before.

With the score tied at 89, Denver's Chauncey Billups drove and was fouled with six tenths of a second remaining. He made the first free throw, and missed the second. Chicago's Joakim Noah grabbed the rebound, the horn sounded, and the game was apparently over.

The officials, however, ordered three tenths of a second put back on, ruling that the Bulls had called a timeout prior to the horn sounding. They did this without consulting the tape. By rule, Chicago had the right to advance the ball to midcourt, setting the stage for its last-ditch play.

Why three tenths? I can't say for sure, but I can make a good guess, because it's what first seemed proper to me, before I took a moment to think about it: The NBA has a rule that a player can catch and shoot in three tenths of a second -- anything less, and the player must tip the ball. Presumably, then, it takes as long to catch the ball and call timeout.

But hang on. If it takes three tenths to catch and shoot, it can't possibly take the same amount of time to catch and call timeout. Catching and shooting involves two distinct actions that must be taken by the same player; namely, gaining possession of the ball, and shooting it. Because you can call timeout verbally and because the officials presumably awarded the timeout to the Bulls on the basis of coach Vinny Del Negro alerting the officials prior to Billups' second shot that his team wanted a timeout as soon as they grabbed the rebound. The gaining of possession and the timeout occurred contemporaneously. Noah didn't bobble the ball. He presumably caught it as fast as anyone can or would have. There's nothing about the "catch" of a rebound that is different from the "catch" in the three-tenths-to-catch-and-shoot rule. Because the officials didn't consult the tape and therefore weren't measuring the time it took Noah to control the ball, the catch couldn't logically have taken three tenths to complete. Given the league's current rules, then, the refs should have put more time back on the clock.

On to the final play, where the three-tenths-to-catch-and-shoot rule again factors in. If we accept, as I think we have to, the premise that some players have quicker releases than other players, then for this rule to make any sense at all, three tenths of a second has to be the absolute minimum amount of time it takes to catch and shoot. If someone can do it faster, then it's unfair to take that skill away from them with the rule. In order for Miller to have gotten his shot off in time, his release would have to be at least as fast as any other player's in the league, something that isn't terribly plausible.

There are a number of other problems with this rule, and precision timing in the end-game in general. For instance, the rule -- at least in its application -- doesn't seem to contemplate where the receiver catches the ball. We've all probably seen instances of a player catching a ball away from his release point, moving it to said point, and releasing it, allegedly within the three tenths of a second time limit. Moving the ball from catch point to release point takes some amount of time, however small, and if you can catch, move, and release in three tenths of a second, you therefore can catch and release, without moving to a release point, in less time.

The way these situations are handled also treat human reaction time oddly, or at least inconsistently. Back when I played high school ball (without tenths of a second on our clocks or the benefit of replay), I learned from my father, a ref, that the rules allowed for one second of reaction time from the moment of the occurrence that triggered the stopping of the clock. For example, on a simple play where the ball goes out of bounds, there's no sensor in the physical basketball that automatically stops the clock the moment the ball hits the floor. The official has to notice that the ball has gone out of bounds and blow his whistle, and the scorer has to similarly react to the whistle. That takes time; hence, the one-second allowance for human reaction time. That time is "made up," so to speak, when the ball is inbounded, and the scorer re-starts the clock a fraction of a second after it has been touched (which is what triggers time beginning to run again).

Today, replay and tenths of a second eliminate this reaction time for stoppages, but it doesn't for restarts. By going to the tape, the officials can see a freeze-frame of the precise moment the ball hits the floor out of bounds, and can reset the clock accordingly, eliminating the reaction time. They cannot similarly do so when the ball is touched by a player on an inbounds pass, and the result is that teams get more time than they technically should.

I do not, at the moment, have a solution that preserves the precision timing an entire generation of basketball fans has become accustomed to. I think it's important, however, to understand the problems with the current system.

(UPDATE: My father, the former ref, did the research I should have done and discovered that, by rule, "no less than :00.3 must expire on the game clock when a player secures possession of an unsuccessful free throw attempt and immediately requests a timeout." This strikes me as kind of silly and arbitrary, as I see no reason why it should take as long to call a timeout as it does to shoot a basketball. But it appears that the officials were right, and I apologize to the officials, as well as anyone who may have been swayed by my argument. It's a good thing hardly anyone reads this blog.)