NEW YORK - The NBA will begin revealing whether it determined referees' crunch-time calls to be right or wrong.
Starting Monday and continuing throughout the playoffs, the league will release play-by-play reports of all calls and relevant no-calls in the final minutes of close games. Such information had been shared only internally.
The assessments will be released by 5 p.m. the day after each game and will stand as the league's comment on whether the most disputed calls were correct. The reports will focus on the last two minutes of games that were within five points at the two-minute mark and all of any overtime periods.
Each play is reviewed by a senior basketball operations manager or senior referee manager. The reports will say how the play was graded - correct or incorrect - and will be accompanied by a comment and video link. The reports will be posted at NBA.com/official and also on the league's media site.
''Our policy in the past was pretty much to wait until we had something that was controversial enough to really garner a lot of interest and we didn't think that that was a practical approach,'' NBA executive vice president of referee operations Mike Bantom said. ''And it also wasn't very fair because they always tended to be errors that were made, so we tried to come up with a system that would allow us to provide some insight into our process and set a criteria that would allow us to be more standardized and more consistent.''
Bantom said the referees had input into the plans and welcomed the change from the league's former policy of announcing only when calls were incorrect.
The referees' union however says they had no involvement in the decision, according to a Friday report by Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski.
"We did not participate in the elaboration of this process and we cannot evaluate its effect until after it has been implemented," National Basketball Referee's Association lawyer Lee Seham told Wojnarowski.
-With files from theScore staff