NBA = No-Flow Basketball.

Time once again to push back on players selling fouls

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When the Warriors’ Steve Kerr went off on the officiating after his team’s recent loss to Denver and superstar Nikola Jokic, he wasn’t really talking about Jokic’s ability to draw foul calls specifically, even though the Joker went to the line 18 times in that game and made all 18 of his free throws.

Kerr made it clear that his ire wasn’t directed at Jokic. Steph Curry, too, emphasized after the game that the conversation about what gets called a foul in the NBA would sound pretty silly if it were centered around Jokic, and Kerr and Curry were both right to take a moment and clarify.

Here’s why. Jokic:

—Stands 6-foot-11, at 250 ell bees.

—Fights through heavy contact almost all the time.

—Rarely complains.

—Has the cuts, scratch marks and scabs to prove he routinely gets physically accosted on his way to the rack.

—At the risk of repeating: Not a complainer.

So it’s not about Jokic. What it is about, though, is the ability of Jokic or any other player, on a night when they can’t make even the routine shots, to simply alter their style of play, initiate contact and be rewarded with free throws. On Christmas Day against the Warriors, Jokic went just 4 for 12 from the field, a rare lousy shooting night for him, but wound up with 26 points anyway after he switched up and started drawing fouls (and foul shots).

"I have a problem with how we are legislating the defense out of the game," Kerr said later. "We are enabling players to B.S. their way to the foul line. If I were a fan, I wouldn't have wanted to watch the second half of that game. It was disgusting.”

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Kerr said more, but let’s stop here for a minute. He’s right. Sludgy, foul-filled basketball is awful. I’d generally watch Nuggets-Warriors anytime, with no dog in the hunt, but that holiday game would have driven almost any fan straight out the living room. It was slooooow.

But the coach is also correct about the bigger picture. After specifically telling officials to stop calling fouls on “non-basketball” plays in 2021, the NBA saw teams average fewer free throws per game for two straight seasons. And then — you know. The emphasis on legislating against those kinds of sell-a-foul plays just sort of wore off, and now fouls and free throws are once again on the rise.

Kerr has sympathy for the refs. “It was just baiting refs into calls,” he said of the Nuggets-Warriors game. “But the refs have to make those calls. The players are really smart in this league. For the last decade, they've gotten smarter and smarter. We have enabled the players, and they are taking full advantage.”

You don’t have to be thinking of James Harden or Chris Paul to understand that. Any ambitious NBAer is going to learn how to sell a move in order to draw a foul call on his defender. It’s Pro Ball 101 at this point. And only forceful league pushback, from the C-suite level on down, is going to change it.

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What happened a couple of years ago was that NBA folks got tired of hearing people complain about their product, which was overall really good but pockmarked by a kind of thread of false fouls, if you will. Why have rashes of foul calls stopping play and stunting the rhythm of a beautiful game?

In 2021, the league announced that officiating staffs would be trained to identify and properly rule “overt non-basketball actions that were designed to initiate contact with defender.” That’s wordy, but it meant things like an offensive player launching into a defender, abruptly veering off path, kicking his leg at an abnormal angle or “hooking” defenders with an arm — all of it to make it appear as if the offensive player had been fouled, but all of it also complete bullspit trickeration. The preferred result for the NBA was either a good no-call or an offensive foul, which would likely discourage such activity, and the league got a lot of what it wanted after alerting the refs to push back on it.

It worked for a bit, is the thing. In 2021 and ‘22, teams averaged some of the fewest free throws per game since records were kept. Alas, we’re now back on the upswing.

It’s certainly not Nikola Jokic’s fault, but it needs to be stiff-armed immediately. The NBA was on to something when it wanted fewer fake fouls called and a greater flow to games, including good solid defense. It was able to move toward that goal because its officials will do whatever the league wants done. This is an entertainment product, after all.

Nobody wants to revert to the Bad Boy Pistons of the old days, when you could neck-chop a guy and then just run back up the court to set your offense. But I’ll tell you, a lot of what we’re seeing called as a shooting foul right now is pure salesmanship. That is definitely something, but perhaps not actually basketball. Let ‘em play — on both sides of the ball.