Incompetence and bias factor big time into the sad state of officiating in the NBA, but I feel like there are some profoundly shitty rules that also play a role.
Yeah. One of the most brilliant things Football did was simplify their rule book. It made the officiating much less controversial.
Calling a charge versus a block basically IS a 50/50 toss up at this point. The player doesn't necessarily have to have established position or even be on the ground (as we saw tonight), and you have guys understandably trying to take advantage of the officials' obvious inability to enforce the rule.
Yeah. Like, apparently Blake was blocking Westbrook at one point because, even though his feet were planted, Westbrook moved to the side and made contact with Griffin's side, making it a block.
Block/charge for stationary defenders needs to be rewritten so the only question is if the defender's feet were planted before contact outside of the restricted area. I'm sure a lot of mistakes would still be made, but the reduced over-thinking on the refs' part would improve accuracy.
The degree and nature of contact allowed in post play is ambiguous. The shove in the back on the rebound is a widely ignored phenomenon. The focus just seems to be constantly on the wrong things and there's frankly too much attempt by the officials to control the game via rules that are poorly defined to begin with.
This is a huge one. The official rules forbid pretty much all contact in the post, but in reality that's impossible to enforce. You're right that, inevitably, the refs decide to just call the game with no consistency based on how they want to call it. As a post player, it's impossible to know game-to-game what the limits are. I have no idea how to rewrite these rules though.
Also as a (sort of) critic of Durant at times, I feel like I should acknowledge that he had an absolutely monstrous game.
-J
Durant is amazing.
EDIT: Did you notice how, during the game, they called very few fouls on jumpshooters? After making a huge deal out of it for weeks, the league realized it had gotten out of control with the CP3 foul at the end of game 5, so they told the refs to roll that business back. Nobody knows what they're doing. These people are paid too much to be this incompetent.