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The NBA Deciding to Crack Down on Push-Offs Now That Jaylen Brown is in Philly Feels Like an Anti-Sixers Conspiracy
By Matt Schultz
Published:
The NBA released a video series on officiating Points of Emphasis for the coming season, and the first thing the league says it’ll be keeping a closer eye on is the off-arm push-off:
I have three big thoughts on this.
1. This is an obvious conspiracy against the Sixers
Just feels a little convenient that the moment Philadelphia trades for the second-most infamous push-off guy in the league (more on the #1 most infamous guy below), the NBA decides it’s going to start calling it a foul. The smoking gun on my This Is All About JB and Boning The Sixers theory is that the video showed Jaylen as the first example. The league’s anti-Sixers agenda is being imprinted on refs’ minds whether they know it or not, consciously or subconsciously: “Watch Jaylen Brown. Call fouls on Jaylen Brown. Jaylen Brown is the enemy… ” It’s not right, especially when there’s a way worse perpetrator who went unnamed…
2. It’s wild that the NBA didn’t include Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in this video
SGA is the unquestioned, all-time basketball leader in illegal push-off bullshit. There’s no way that omitting him from the video was an oversight — this was an active choice. It had to be. The only question I have is why. After giving it some thought, here are my two guesses:
- If the NBA showed SGA doing his signature push-off in this video, they’d be admitting that he does in fact push off, and in turn they’d be conceding they awarded two MVPs to a guy who does most of his scoring by doing something illegal.
- There were too simply many clips of him doing the push-off to choose from, and trying to pick the right one out of a million got overwhelming to the editor. The editor got lightheaded. The lights were too bright. The editor gave up.
3. This will never, ever work
There’s no way refs will be able to distinguish this as a foul in real time. At the NBA level, the game is too fast, the players are too fast, and both the offense and defense are flopping and trying to sell calls at all times. If anything, saying this is a point of emphasis could make that stuff even worse. The flopping could get next-level bad now.
Also, there’s just not enough of a distinction between what’s legal and what’s not. The extreme, over-the-top, full-extension push-offs are easier to spot, for sure — but most of the legal examples in the video look a lot like the egregious ones. NBA refs are already bad and gullible and miss stuff constantly. This just affords them more chances to be bad and gullible and stuff constantly
In conclusion
Hats off to the NBA for pretending to care about this, I guess, but it feels like a half-measure that ultimately won’t make a difference. Which is good for the Sixers and Jaylen Brown, but is probably not good for the actual product.
I will take that. That’s fine for now. Go Sixers.
Matt Schultz is a comedy and sports writer from Philadelphia. He’s written extensively for ClickHole, The Onion, and Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco. His work has been featured in Vulture, Deadspin, The A.V. Club, Paste Magazine, and other publications. Much of his sports journalism can be found on college basketball websites that don’t exist anymore (PhilaHoops Heads rise up…) email: M.Schultz@sportradar.com