NBA looking for solutions to epidemic of 3-shot fouls
Warning: Story contains coarse language
NBA teams and players will always look for exploitable loopholes in the league's rule book, and each year the league does its best to identify and close those loopholes.
Last year, the chief focus was on figuring out how to eradicate or at least limit Hack-a-Shaq. This year, a new crisis has come to the fore: the preponderance of players going out of their way to draw three-shot fouls.
"It's f---ing ridiculous," one anonymous head coach told ESPN's Tom Haberstroh. "It's a f---ing epidemic."
Getting a defender in the air and creating contact on a jumper is nothing new, but an increasingly common and egregious occurrence this year has seen players draw fouls by launching into a flailing 3-point shot as soon as they feel any manner of contact.
Miami Heat point guard Goran Dragic described changing his approach after studying film of James Harden, perhaps the league's most proficient drawer of three-shot fouls. After noticing what Harden was doing, Dragic started doing the same: He would start his normal high pick-and-roll, but as soon as he would feel the contact, he would "just stop" and go into his shooting motion. A barrage of three-shot fouls ensued. Even his coach, Erik Spoelstra, wasn't a fan of Dragic adopting the tactic.
"The only reason I accept it is because I was getting burned by it," Spoelstra told Haberstroh.
Kiki Vandeweghe, the NBA's VP of basketball operations, says the league has been monitoring the situation closely, and will take a serious look at how it can improve the problem during the NBA competition committee meeting in July. As with any rule tweak, Vandeweghe knows there will be no easy fixes, and that the league needs to be careful about how it goes about enacting the change.
"Given the two sides of it, do you really want to fix it?" he told Haberstroh. "Is a fix what our game needs or wants given how good of a place the game is right now? We want to be careful and thoughtful about it."