Doper basketball fans will be familiar with the following situation that occurs late in games when the score is fairly close:
The team who is behind (Team A) commits a quick foul against Team B (preferably against a poor free-throw shooter) with the purpose of stopping the clock and sending Team B to the free-throw line in the hope of them missing the free-throw, and then Team A getting the ball back on offense.
Usually time is very critical at this point (often with just a few seconds left in the game) so a key part of this “desperation” strategy is to commit the foul as soon as possible. Because Team B is aware of this they try to avoid allowing Team A to foul. They’ll make passes to players with no defender near them and play a sort of “keep-away” with the ball to try to waste as much time as possible before the inevitable foul.
What I don’t understand is: on a Team B inbounds play, why doesn’t Team A just foul a player before the ball is inbounded? If they do this, Team A can get a Team B guy to the line with no time coming off the clock. I’ve seen this happen a handful of times but in those cases it seemed to be an accident instead of a deliberate tactic. Why don’t teams in Team A’s position do this every single time?
True, you would have to be careful about how you foul or you’d risk committing a flagrant foul. But that’s also true when the ball’s in play with the clock running. As far as I know there is no special rule that treats a foul committed before an inbound pass any differently than any other.
AIUI, a foul away from the ball happens only during playing time. During an inbound, the clock is stopped, so any foul that happens is a technical foul.
Under NBA rules, if an Off-the-Ball Foul is committed in the last 2 minutes of the Final Period against a player who is not in possession of the ball and is making no attempt to receive, or get in position to receive the ball; the player who was fouled will shoot 2 Free Throws, and their team will regain possession following the shots, regardless of the number of Team Fouls the team of the player who fouled possesses. They will then inbound the ball from the sideline
To add to the above, in the last 2 minutes fouling the inbounding player awards the fouled player one free throw and possession does not change. After the free throw, they go right back to where they started, i.e. Team B goes to inbound again.
I should maybe have specified I was curious about college basketball as that is primarily what I watch. I don’t know much about the more intricate NBA rules but I do keep up with NCAA and have a pretty good idea of their rules, “esoteric” or not.
The Diego– I am 99.3% sure that as long as the ref has handed off the ball to the inbounding player and started the 5-second count, a normal foul with the clocked stopped is not a technical–at least in NCAA. However, I’d be more than happy to have my ignorance fought on this. That’s why I started the thread!
As I said in my OP, I have seen fouls committed in that situation and they weren’t technicals. Usually they are screening or body fouls when everyone is running around to get open.
According to that link, those special circumstances are indeed the case in the last 2 minutes of an NBA game but in **“any other circumstances, and in other competitions, an Inbounds Foul is treated as a normal Personal Foul.”
**
If that page you linked to is accurate then my question remains valid for NCAA basketball: why don’t teams use this tactic to foul with no time coming off the clock?
That’s certainly true a lot of the time but under some circumstances it could be better to foul and you still don’t see it done in those situations.
Maybe the opponent has a really bad FT shooter on the floor. Or maybe if you are down by 1 and there is so little time left–say 2 seconds-- that the benefit of almost* certainly regaining the ball before the clock starts outweighs the somewhat slim chance of getting a steal.
“almost” because the free-throw shooting team could rebound a missed free-throw or intentionally miss the FT.
Or defending the inbounds so well as to get a 5 second violation.
When I played in high school we had this situation, as the trailing team, and our strategy was to try to draw an offensive foul from the inbounding team. I was instructed to grab hold of a guy’s jersey and physically pull him onto me, fall over, make a big scene about it and pray the officials were incredibly incompetent. It did not work.
There is no explicit provision on pre-inbounds fouling in NCAA rules. However, such a foul, if too obvious, can be called an intentional foul, resulting in the fouled team retaining possession of the ball after the free throw.
Wait, hold up. I’m not a basketball fan but this is news to me. You’re not allowed to intentionally foul someone? Even though everyone knows that all of these late game fouls by the losing team are 100% intentional? Why are they allowed?
AIUI from this thread, an intentional foul comes with an extra penalty of giving the opposing team possession after their free throws. So my question is, if these fouls are obviously intentional, why aren’t they punished as such?
They’re actually not called “intentional fouls” anymore, they’re “Flagrant 1” and “Flagrant 2” fouls.
A “Flagrant 1” is where there is no play on the ball, e.g. a player has no reasonable chance to block a shot and instead just bear hugs the shooter to prevent him from moving his arms.
A “Flagrant 2” is for “unnecessary and excessive” contact, e.g. instead of going for a block, you just shove the shooter to the ground.
OK, so when Freddy said that a foul couldn’t be “too obvious,” he was incorrect, because reading the NCAA flagrant foul rule change memo, it explicitly says that they change the name because intent was never a factor.
I always took it to mean that you’d do anything to try to gain possession of the ball, and if that means making contact that amounts to a foul, you don’t care. You’d prefer to just steal the ball if you could, but that’s probably not going to happen, so you do your best and end up fouling the guy. You don’t commit a foul that is clearly not an attempt to get the ball, or it will be considered flagrant.
