impromptu meeting at midcourt with referees<\/a> after a playoff loss in Oklahoma City to voice concerns.<\/p>\n\u2014 Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson pointed out that Cavs star guard Donovan Mitchell wasn’t getting to the line very often in Games 1 and 2 of the series with Detroit; Mitchell got there 11 times, total, in those games (both Cleveland losses) and got there 11.5 times on average in the next two games (both Cleveland wins). That, in turn, led to Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff to comment after Game 4.<\/p>\n
And those are just some examples.<\/p>\n
\u201cStanding up for your team is a job descriptor of an NBA head coach and most certainly I don\u2019t begrudge a head coach the desire to represent for himself, his team, most certainly his players,” McCutchen said. “That\u2019s part of the voice of an NBA head coach that I have an understanding of. My job is to take those commentaries and decide or see what is true and what is avocation. And now, even if it is true, it\u2019s very important that I\u2019m not putting my foot on the scale of a series.\u201d<\/p>\n
Playoff referees \u2014 not all referees get playoff assignments, and the roster of officials gets pared down after each round based on performance \u2014 study tape after games, just as they do in the regular season. Every call is evaluated, and McCutchen has said several times in recent years that the league’s referee corps is constantly striving to do better.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not putting our whistles in our pocket,\u201d McCutchen said. \u201cThat being said, I think it\u2019s fair to debate, talk about passionately, like many of our fans and people in the media do, about whether that\u2019s the appropriate enough of whistles to blow. But we are trying to meet the moments of the passion of the playoffs in a way that upholds our standards.\u201d<\/p>\n
That tends to come with more calls. The NBA is seeing an increase in foul calls from the regular season to the playoffs for the 66th time in its 80-year history. This season is seeing a differential of higher than 10% in that regard for only the sixth time in the last 60 years. (The five biggest increases in that differential, ranging from 13% to 17%, all took place between 1949 and 1955.)<\/p>\n
McCutchen looks at the playoffs this way: Aggression is good, rough is not.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t like to see ejections,” McCutchen said. “Our goal would be to get through all these games where we meet this right up to the edge of rough and you have this really aggressive, passionate game that is adjudicated and an environment is created in which that environment of aggressiveness is rewarded \u2014 because we have the best players in any sport, in my opinion \u2014 but that it doesn\u2019t creep over to rough. That\u2019s the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP NBA: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/NBA<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO (AP) \u2014 NBA referees are calling about 11% more personal fouls per game so far in these…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,726,590,31647,13799,1628,85,41167],"class_list":["post-668869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-nba","tag-nba-basketball","tag-nba-playoffs","tag-s","tag-sports","tag-sports-officiating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}