Hoops

Melbourne United referees stood down

I don't think he would have though too much of it actually, maybe a shake of the head and a small blessing that he will soon return to the U.S.A...

What hope do we have when they keep calling charges when the defender has one foot in the air?

Successive weeks of referees being stood down over games involving calls leading to close wins to Melbourne United.

Great team but they're riding their luck!

I agree Macdub, it would be great to have a senior International Fiba Ref as the Referee's Commissioner in charge of improving/maintaining the standard of refereeing in the NBL.
I wonder how much someone qualified would cost per season?

Is it worth the NBL throwing money at getting a very highly skilled FIBA referee official over here to train, monitor and develop and upskill refereeing talent?

Differences in the quality of refereeing is just like the differences in quality of players - there's your Lebrons, Steph Currys, Westbrooks etc and there's your local social league player who can't make a layup.

The positive is that that social league player will probably never be a Westbrook, Curry or Lebron.

But in the refereeing sense, the social league guy can be a Westbrook, Curry or Lebron. Training, education and time.

They have sorted the issue with the poor decision making by the Refs, now what about the flopping issue?

Games should be able to be video reviewed post match by a Refereeing Panel and fines/suspensions given for Unsportsmanlike conduct and Flopping that may have been missed by the game Refs.

I think that was the one thing missing in the whole scenario, the application of common sense, very hard to teach because it is very hard to find...

That Griffin quote doesn't really apply, though. They got the sequence of events bang on, they just applied a rule that didn't exist after ten minutes of discussion. That's the sort of thing that's inexcusable.

Blowing calls in live play I can live with. But that? No.

I don't think the problem is that the ref's here are corrupt, I think its more lack of experience and poor decision making.

What realistic measures could they introduce to close the referee skilling gap - both long term and short term.

I can't see the NBL having the money to recruit Euro and NBA calibre referees to Australia. Could BA and the NBL work together to create some kind of Referee Academy?

They didn't just stuff up, they had a ten-minute chat between them and some other bloke and ended up applying a rule that doesn't exist.