I agree with this post. Shooters now WANT to land on defenders feet and simply come down with no weight on their feet so they fall before landing. Defenders are not allowed to defend the 3 ball. Coincidentally (sarcasm) it seems like dudes are making more threes than ever before.
Ya plus if you run to the side to contest then the shooter can simply pump fake and now the defender has moved way over to the side to allow a wide open path. As a defender you always want to stay between the ball handler/shooter and the basket. This rule makes defenders either not contest or contest in such a poor way that they are not impeding the offensive players path to the basket.
You can remove the sarcasm part. It's real. They know what shots they can take with impunity and this is one of them. As has been stated before, players will find a way to exploit the rules to their advantage. We saw an increase in offense foul calls, so we created a flopping culture. We see an increase in fouls called on 3 point shots, so we see an increase in 3 point shots. It obviously isn't the only factor, but it's not a small part of it. If you are going to get a call on a long 2 just take an extra step back and get the same call with a chance at 3 free throws.
That was my point. Levert clearly came straight into Clarksons landing zone. Clearly a foul, and based on rules this year, clearly a flagarant one.
I guarantee you many players are adding an extra foot to their forward travel on those shots now since those foul calls are so easy to come by. I agree this one was a bigger difference for Levert, so the foul is of course valid by current standards. But it doesn't mean that players like Clarkson haven't fundamentally altered their shots according to what the refs will give them. Same with the tendency to slide sideways if the defender is trying to come over the screen, then magically the offensive player has a sideways slant to his jump to bring him into contact with the defender. Or even backward, we have seen that too. But these are viewed as "natural" movements for the purpose of the rule, so the player can do something completely different in 3 different scenarios to draw the fouls, and it is all viewed as "natural". Obviously the way this is called has changed the way the players react.
Good point about the screen fouls. If you a chase a player over a screen then the offensive player just has to stop and jump a little to the side (into the trailing defender who is running full speed to get around the screen) and get rewarded for 3 free throws.
Ya in my post you quoted i literally condeded the clarkson play against cleveland lol.
This is really what the league wants. They want unfettered offense. It is the exciting part of the game, so the more exciting they can make it the better it is to get butts in the seats and lucrative TV deals. So they adjust and change rules to favor the offensive players, and by a lot. I really think the recent rule changes that have resulted in such haphazard calls was done to allow the refs to control the flow of the game. They can call, or not call, damn near anything now. Seemingly with no logic most of the time. We see one play on one end with a flagrant (Ingles brushes the guy's foot trying to get out of the way) then we see a much more egregious foul on the other go uncalled completely (at least 2 times I can think of when Clarkson was completely undercut at the rim and fell hard, a real risk to the playera), and imo the reason it falls like that is only partly on human error, but also partly, if not more so, on controlling the flow of the game. I cannot think of times before the last 2 years that we so often see players looking completely confused at a no-call, as they KNOW it would have been called in the past, only to see the same or an even less-egregious foul being called the other way the very next play. We have seen plays almost stop dead when MULTIPLE players expected a foul call, only to see the refs saying "play on". I think this inconsistency is so they can have more lee-way in controlling the flow of the game, whether it is to get to a specific outcome or not is debatable. But believe me they are trying to create the product the NBA thinks people want to pay for, and if there are 2 things humans thrive on it is "winning" (i.e. favoring the offensive player), and controversy. That draws people back for the drama of it. It is the WWE aspect of the NBA being fully brought to bear to keep interest high. Sadly it is what people are willing to pay for.
Did anyone else hear/read that in Boler's voice? haha.
For a while that was true with Harden moves and those have been neutered a lot. Refs largely ignore Olynyk now, even when he gets fouled. Clarkson did jump forward, but it didn't seem too unnatural, he was trying to get to an open spot, and he drained it.
