Since you’re pretty diligent about checking the latest news out of Okinawa, you’re probably aware that college basketball has begun, but I wouldn’t be so smug about it; in fact, there is so much new to learn about the new season at hand that it probably would pass for course work in all but a few major programs.
To begin with, there are more than 30 new rules in the game this season, and you would think a veritable judicial revolution like this would have included at least a few of the changes for which I had hoped, but strangely no.
Timeouts have been reduced, which is good, but only by one, which isn’t, so each team still gets 57.
In each half.
Players may continue to leave their stations between free throws to congratulate a shooting teammate who has just missed the front end of a one-and-one. I had advocated for a rule keeping all players in place unless said teammate had actually made the free throw.
Coaches still will be stationed on or near the bench, rather than in the stands, as I’ve suggested, or better yet, locked in their offices where they can grimace and gesticulate until they have a seizure rather than make such a spectacle of themselves and provide a sorry example for the so-called student-athletes.
Worst of all, coaches can continue to at least partially make their own schedules, the very thing that allowed Pitt to open with a signature half-win at Okinawa (the game was canceled halfway through because of excess moisture on the floor), then pummel Saint Joseph’s College, 84-43, Tuesday night back on this continent.
“If we can have success against an ACC team, I’m sure we can have success against some of the Division II teams that we play,” Saint Joseph’s junior Nathan Tidwell said afterward. “We got the ball into the post, we got fouled and got offensive rebounds.”
And that’s where Tidwell forgot to add, “and we got beat by almost as many points as we scored.”
That’s a tortured definition of success right there, Nathan, but the fact is, St. Joseph himself could not have saved the Pumas from getting outscored, 40-8, in the paint by Jamie Dixon’s team. There were more than six times as many people inside Petersen Events Center for Pitt’s home opener than there are on the entire Saint Joseph’s College campus in beautiful Rensselaer, Ind.
Anyway, as I mentioned, there is just too much homework to do on college basketball right now to entertain these common harangues. We’re here to talk about the new rules today, so we’ll dilly no further.
Partly because scoring reached near-historic lows last year and partly because every game seemed to include more stoppages than the early rehearsals of a high school production of Les Miserables, the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel has attempted to achieve a game with a better pace, fewer interruptions and reduced physicality.
It says here these are worthy goals, as basketball is meant to be played with a certain fluidity and grace, rather than by the strategies adhered to in demolition derby.
Toward that end, the new rule getting the most attention and having the least practical impact is the shot clock, now set at 30 seconds rather than the 35 it has been for the past 22 years. Theoretically this would result in 14 percent more opportunity for the offense, but there’s no corresponding guarantee relative to points. So that’s basically eyewash.
The better new rule is that an offensive player can no longer score on a charge, which eliminates the caveat that he darn well could if he released the shot before knocking a previously stationary defender deep into the nachos. Another good change is the recognition of conceptual vertical space and the offensive player’s right to same. A defender can no longer invade an offensive player’s vertical space with impunity. In other words, a player with the ball should be able to jump without getting bashed by a defender’s tree limbs. Another prudent new rule concerns this business of “displacement,” meaning all players are entitled to the space on which they are standing, and cannot be displaced by an opposing player’s hip or backside. And more good news: Coaches can no longer call a timeout when the ball is live (by which we mean not dead). The ball shall be considered dead from the time it exits the net until it comes into the hands of the throw-in player behind the baseline.
But not all the changes are positive, in this view.
From now on, officials will be able to go to the monitor to determine whether the release of a shot beat the shot clock any time they want to, not just in the final two minutes.
You’re looking at four more commercials per telecast, right there.
Worse, officials who are at a monitor to determine whether what they’ve just seen constitutes a flagrant foul, now can call a technical foul if they determine from the video that the victimized player was faking it.
This means you’ll be doing a lot more watching television on which the people you’re watching on television will be watching television.
So look, we weren’t able to cover all of the rule changes in this class, so we’ll do that in the semester that starts in January, when everyone is playing legitimate opponents and the officials have gone back to the customary willful ignorance of just about every rule in the book.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: November 19, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
