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The Mavericks coach is the president of the coach's association and a key member of the NBA's competition committee, which is meeting in San Antonio to discuss ways the game could be better. What does he think about some HoopIdeas?

The NBA's competition committee is meeting this week, and David Stern says they'll be discussing profound changes to refereeing, for instance with a room full of officials reviewing calls off-site on video in real time. We asked one of the most respected in league history, Steve Javie, what referees would think about that.

David Stern's NBA has been aggressively progressive, moving early on everything from globalization, a number of race issues, women in sports, drug testing and many kinds of technology. And now they're ready to lead the way again.

HoopIdea was born in 2012 with a mission to focus on ways the best game in the world could be even better. A year and a half later, HoopIdea has helped move the needle -- on traveling, flopping, drug testing, speeding up the game and more.

One of the big opportunities for the league now, however, is to give key officials the best possible information about what's actually happening on the court, specifically with real-time high-def video. Fans have it at home and increasingly in the arena. And the league has it, if it wants it.

"We're actually even toying with the notion," Stern divulged before Game 1 in Miami, "of whether replay can be done [by] offsite review, the way it's done in the NHL, to relieve the burden on the referees, who are stuck in the middle of intense gametime action."

Deputy commissioner Adam Silver outlined a vision of how things might work in the future: "If you have a group of officials in a broadcast center somewhere, location could almost be anywhere in this day and age of digital media, there wouldn't be that delay which officials need to walk over, turn the monitor around, put the headphones on, call for the replays. You could have offsite officials looking at multiple monitors at once."

Why does this matter? Because this is how the game evolves to keep up with the world. Now that Silicon Valley means as much as Wall Street, and most fans have high-def instant replay in their living rooms, the league appears ready to use high-quality, real-time replay in a way that will let the league base in-game decisions on the best possible insight, insight that is commonly available to fans.

It also solves a key riddle: Missed calls echo in eternity, now. Flopping isn't especially new, but annoyance at it has reached a fever pitch in the DVR/YouTube era, when motivated fans know when officials are fooled. The truth can hurt, especially when the truth is the league got something blatantly wrong. There's no reason to believe refereeing has ever been better, or is better in any other league, and yet only in the past few seasons has the league been compelled to announce corrections and missed calls in the days following the game. Thanks to video, there's little point in denying it.

Video review isn't a perfect way to fix bad calls. But it's a perfect way to fix calls that are clearly bad on video. Those are the ones causing the NBA credibility problems.

That can and should happen in real time, and it makes more sense than ever. It's also a perfect avenue for the league to truly address a number of issues, including flopping. The NBA's current flopping penalties are based on video review, but with a day's delay or more. To a lot of players, flops are still a way to help a team win. Real-time video review would expose the floppers in the seconds after the flop, when a penalty would mean something.

Earlier this week, we wrote that the key solution to the NBA's problems with its rules, officiating and sluggish game was to Just Play Basketball. But to do that, the league has to create the best possible systems, rules and enforcement. The way to allow the game to flourish and let its great athletes play offense and defense as it was meant to be played is to keep the rules and officials and delays out of their way.

"It's a subject of continued discussion in our office, and has been," Stern said. "Because as I said and have been quoted, the idea that everyone with a smart phone can see it, everyone at home can see it, everyone …"

"Except," Silver chimed in, "the official."

"We've got to find a way to make it a little smoother," Stern concluded. "But we like it a lot, because it is very much evidence of the fact that we care about getting it right."

A year and a half into HoopIdea, our motto, more than ever:

“Basketball is the best game ever. Now let’s make it better.”

The fun comes from the fact that this is at once both a radical position and a no-brainer.

Not even this game is perfect. Once you get over the sting of that, though, as a basketball fan, of course you know it’s true. Nothing is perfect. We all get that. Phil Jackson gets that.

NBA rules committee shud make a rule change. Naismith set up the game to eliminate fouling, therefore a team shud not profit from fouls.

— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 11, 2013

At the inception of bball the player who fouled also had to go out just like hockey. The evolution of the game brought in the foul shot.

— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 11, 2013

If fouling is against the premise of the game there is a way to eliminate it. Use of designated shooter from 5 players on court like a tech

— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 11, 2013

The conversation is happening. It’s not just HoopIdea making it happen. It’s Jeff Van Gundy, Phil Jackson, Bill Simmons. And it’s fans, fans and more fans. As soon as HoopIdea opened the door to the conversation about how the game could be better, fans streamed in with thousands of ideas and emails supporting the effort.

The NBA itself has weighed in extensively, mostly in quiet conversations. And even if the league hasn’t enacted every change it could, league officials have been thoughtful and open to discussing how to improve the game. They get it.

As NBA fans, we can have whatever game we want. The more we examine the game and talk about it, the more it becomes clear where the NBA’s focus should be -- on basketball.

When the NBA gets it wrong, that’s because something is standing between the best players in the world and the best game in the world.

There’s a long list of things NBA players do better than anyone in the world. Handling the ball, stealing it, blocking it into the third row, working together in delightful and synchronous ways and, most of all, inventing more and better ways to score, from near and far.

Those are the things that players at every level want to do, and those are the things fans want to see.

The NBA is ready to act
The engines of change are fired up. The competition committee that was once a famously backward and ineffective collection of 30 bored or agenda-driven team reps is now a lean collection of 10 at least fairly forward thinkers.

HoopIdea has touched a ton of different parts of the game, such as tanking, the schedule and concussion prevention and care.

And some of the changes we have been pushing for have found success.

FLOPPING
We heard from readers that flopping was a top annoyance, so we went all-in. We launched Flop of the Night as part of a nearly 100-post multimedia campaign on TrueHoop, joining Van Gundy and others who had long called for a flop ban. And boom, presto, a few months later the NBA created not just a new rule against flopping but also a new, more nimble competition committee to handle such suggestions in the future. When I asked David Stern why he addressed flopping now, of all times, he said, “It’s something that’s been building. There has been a lot of comment about it.” It was a team effort, but we’ll chalk it up as a HoopIdea W.

TRAVELING
This was forerunner of HoopIdea, which showed the NBA could be nimble in making the game better. In a nutshell, TrueHoop said nobody, including NBA referees, seemed to understand the NBA’s ambiguous traveling rule. So the league changed the rule to make it crystal clear. Hats off to the NBA for that.

STOP DRUG CHEATS
The NBA has long banned performance-enhancing drugs. But HoopIdea found its testing has fallen well behind the state of the art. Real change has not yet come, but it’s close, with the first NBA blood tests -- these ones for human growth hormone -- expected as soon as next season.

SPEED UP THE GAME
This was the original HoopIdea -- what’s with all the delays? Too much dead-ball time. It’s still a problem, but how gratifying to hear from NBA vice president of basketball operations Stu Jackson, about five minutes into this February video, that “not having wasted time” is the first of his office’s priorities moving forward.

The NBA has always gotten almost everything right. When it gets it wrong, it’s because the focus strays from the best players in the world playing the best game in the world.

Enough shenanigans
Phil Jackson knows what he’s talking about.

In those tweets above, he's saying he sees too much intentional fouling.

Teams foul to stop layups. They foul to stop showy dunks. They foul to send warnings, they foul to please coaches, they foul because it’s the playoffs, and they foul because the game is important. They foul to stop fast breaks or to get the ball back when trailing in crunch time.

Mostly they foul because, sing it with me, it’s HoopIdea’s anti-theme: “This is the way we have always done it.”

It robs us of real basketball a dozen times a game, at least.

A scene from the end of the first half of Game 5 between the Pacers and Knicks: The Pacers inbound from the far baseline, and we, as fans, are due for something. The ball is in the middle of the floor, the seconds on the clock are down to 2.8.

Ten amazing, creative, brilliant players are on the move, with three seconds to cook something up. It’s mathematically impossible we won’t get a 3 or a dunk or a lob or something. Best of all, for us as fans, we know the defense isn’t set, so whatever shot arrives will likely have a good chance.

Time for some NBA basketball
Or not.

David West plays quarterback, lobbing a pass over the middle to Lance Stephenson, who jumps like a wide receiver, eyes behind him on the oncoming ball.

What he doesn’t see is Tyson Chandler running at him with a head of steam and the profoundly unfair advantage of two feet on the ground. Stephenson makes the catch; Chandler makes the hit. Stephenson looks like he has been shot. The explosion is so great that 228 pounds of Stephenson instantly reverse course; he was flying toward the Pacers hoop, now he’s moving in the opposite direction. From midcourt he ends up writhing on the ground just by the NBA Playoffs logo on the Madison Square Garden floor.

Chandler, who had concussed another Pacer, George Hill, a game earlier and sent Stephenson dangerously to the floor not three minutes earlier, would surely be punished for this dangerous high-speed collision. Surely the rules are against Chandler for risking injury and erasing the kind of beautiful moment that keep fans tuning in?

Right?

Not exactly. In fact, as both an athletic open-court finisher and a poor free throw shooter, Stephenson is among the NBA’s most commonly mauled players. The math of fouling him hard is good.

As predicted by his career 64 percent free throw shooting, Stephenson made just one of two, meaning the Knicks went from fearing giving up two or three points to giving up one and getting the ball back with 2.4 seconds on the clock. And for good measure, Stephenson had some thinking to do about his personal safety.

Smart man, that Chandler.

The Knicks lobbed their own long pass to a streaking athlete, J.R. Smith, who has a habit of making memories, good or bad. But before Smith could properly contain the ball, let alone activate his thrilling shooter’s motion, here comes Sam Young with an intentional foul of his own.

Minutes had passed. There were substitutions by the half-dozen. Smith shot his three free throws, making two. The Knicks started the last three seconds without the ball but were now plus-one after committing one of the most dangerous intentional fouls of the week.

Four-tenths of a second had ticked off the clock.

Score one, or two, for shenanigans.

The Pacers inbounded once again and missed a 70-footer.

Through it all, we got a lot of process, some video reviews, five boring free throws, plenty of standing around, a forest of intentional fouls and not one second of anything that resembles your pickup game -- you know, the game where five players honestly try to use artistry and athleticism to score over or around five players who are honestly trying to stop them.

Why can’t they just play basketball?
Why must we tolerate all those risky intentional fouls, delays and lack of artistry?

The NBA has, in recent years, increased penalties to protect players who are shooting 3-pointers or who have a “clear path.”

Time to make a similar update for players who have a full head of steam headed for a layup or dunk.

There are plenty of options:

• FIBA has long-since banned intentional fouls, and these same players do just fine without intentional fouling in the Olympics.
• Jackson proposes letting the fouled team pick who shoots the free throws.
• I like the idea of giving the fouled team one free throw and the ball back -- taking some of the action away from the boring free throw line while reducing the benefit to the fouling team, which would no longer get the ball back.
• Another thought is to simply let the fouled team choose, with every foul, whether it wants free throws or the ball, which would take almost all intentional fouls out of the game.

There are no obstacles, however. The instant the NBA decides it doesn’t like the look of those plays, this game can be far better. The competition committee meets next week.

Once in a while a measurement can change everything.

For instance, if you were born since the middle of the last century, the beginning of your life was changed by a metric. he most essential and timeless human act (or, at least one of them) changed globally and instantly in the middle of the last century when a doctor named Virginia Apgar thought to score newborns on their health, as described by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

The Apgar score, as it became known universally, allowed nurses to rate the condition of babies at birth on a scale from zero to ten. An infant got two points if it was pink all over, two for crying, two for taking good, vigorous breaths, two for moving all four limbs, and two if its heart rate was over a hundred. Ten points meant a child born in perfect condition. Four points or less meant a blue, limp baby.

The score was published in 1953, and it transformed child delivery. It turned an intangible and impressionistic clinical concept—the condition of a newly born baby—into a number that people could collect and compare. Using it required observation and documentation of the true condition of every baby. Moreover, even if only because doctors are competitive, it drove them to want to produce better scores—and therefore better outcomes—for the newborns they delivered.

I think hoops is due for an Apgar moment.

We have lots of new measures, and they are changing the game bit by bit. PER has liberated us from a lot of dumb conversations about which boxscore stats matter more. Plus/minus, in its various forms, has started to shed light on the value of individual defense and 100 other tough-to-measure things.

But the real basic thing, the way that a measurement could change every NBA game for the better, every night, is to measure this one thing: Was that shooter open?

That's the thing I want to know.

Introduce that to the equation, and all of a sudden things get very interesting:

• It'll quickly become obvious that who's open matters more than making sure the most famous players shoot. Covered guys usually miss. Open guys usually hit.
• It'll help separate the very few players who are at all efficient when covered from chuckers.
• Like doctors competed with each other to have good Apgar scores, so will coaches compete to have teams with good open shot percentages -- after all, this is the measure of an offensive tactician. That's the antidote to Scott Brooks and Mike Woodson essentially saying "get it to the star" all through losing playoff series.
• I'm dying to know this about point guards: How likely are their teammates to get open looks?

There are some challenges. What is and is not open is open to debate. And the data is tricky to collect for other reasons too.

But the fact is that it's already tracked in various ways. Many teams dig into such things with their internal numbers. SportVu dabbles in it, as do other startups peddling data packages to teams. It's kind of knowable. What we need, though, is for it to be part of the boxscore, part of the daily dialogue, part of how every game is judged and discussed from the bar stool to talk radio.

Then we'll get quick and instant pressure on every team to play better, more effective basketball.

 

Tanking teams are ridiculed right up until the tactic pays off.

The Warriors are out of the playoffs. But the mood in Oakland has been light in the wake of playoff defeat. Friday's exit interviews at the Warriors practice facility were full of brimming grins. The rhetoric is suffused with hope, not disappointment. This team is building something, not reeling from destruction. The future is now.

Without Barnes, the No. 7 pick in last year's draft, the postseason sentiment would not be so chipper. Not only does he carry a world of enticing possibilities, but the athletic 20-year-old already helped this team overachieve. When David Lee was felled by injury in the first round, Barnes stepped in and drowned the Nuggets in 3s. On the series, he shot 40.3 percent from downtown to go along with precocious good defense.

In doing so, Barnes has become a symbol for Warriors optimism and also, indirectly, a symbol for the practicality of tanking. Just as the "Thunder Model" compelled various teams to ardently pursue awfulness (see Bobcats, Charlotte), Barnes' playoff run is all the reason another franchise needs to pack it in.

It wasn't so long ago that the Warriors had a shot at another playoff run. On March 14 of 2012, Golden State was only three games under .500 with 27 left to play. Instead of making one final playoff push, the Warriors went the other way, consciously. Monta Ellis and Ekpe Udoh were traded for Andrew Bogut, who was out that season with a fractured ankle. In the short term, a deal like that could only hurt the Warriors. The upside had something to do the Utah Jazz and a protected NBA lottery pick.

John Hollinger described the move in real time:

The big loser here may be the Utah Jazz, as part of Golden State's motivation appears to be an elaborate ruse to avoid ceding a lottery pick to Utah. The timing is bizarre because the Warriors had played themselves into playoff contention, but the Warriors' brass had to view the landscape and see that (A) they were still highly unlikely to make the playoffs and (B) they owed their first-round pick to the Jazz if it didn't fall in the top seven.

If the Warriors had designs on playing better after the trade, they certainly didn't show it on the court. Golden State went 5-22 post-swap, with an ugly 1-10 closing stretch. Enough games were missed by enough players that the injuries seemed a little too coincidental. Even if the Warriors weren't actually tanking, the results were compelling enough to make any sentient observer believe that they were.

So the Warriors were either deliberately trying to lose or doing a fantastic imitation of what such a thing would look like. This matters because it sends a blaring signal to other teams that obvious tanking is worth salvaging protected picks.

Remember, the Warriors weren't in line to get a hyped No. 1 pick like Anthony Davis. They'd all but missed out on that sweepstakes because there's no competing with the stink unleashed by teams like the 2011-12 Bobcats and 2011-12 Wizards.

Instead, Golden State was vying for a mid-lottery pick. We tend to associate tanking with a frenzy to get the next LeBron James or Tim Duncan. The Warriors were dragging their fans through an indignity of a season to get, say, the next Danilo Gallinari. All the while those fans were mocking the bad basketball on Twitter with hashtags like #TankExpress, #TankAcrossAmerica and #TankOrDie.

On the face of it, this was a foolish move. Subjecting your franchise to such mockery and malaise for a shot at a Hall of Famer? Sure.

Doing it for a chance at a mere starter? That was beyond the pale. As Jay Caspian Kang put it on the Grantland blog:

There's a way to spin pretty much everything that happens on a basketball team into something resembling reason -- especially in this era of the uninformed armchair GM and his circular gospel of efficiency -- but it's embarrassing, both to your fans and your franchise, to tank so hard when all that's at stake is the seventh pick in a two-player draft.

The Warriors were breaking new ground in the already ridiculous realm of what amounts to socially acceptable point shaving. And, rather than having it all blow up in their faces, Golden State won a coin flip for the seventh pick and selected a player who helped reinvigorate their franchise. If it wasn't standard practice to tank for a late protected pick before, it will be going forward. Other teams saw what the Warriors pulled off.

Rather than blame the Warriors, or the future teams that will emulate them, we should ask ourselves: Why does pick protection have to exist?

There's already enough incentive to tank without a "you'll completely lose your pick otherwise" threat. The problem is actually compounded later in the lottery, where the Warriors were selecting. The later a team selects, the more predictable the lottery becomes.

If your team is the NBA’s worst, you still only have a 25 percent chance of the top overall pick. If your team is eighth-worst, you have over an 80 percent chance of getting a pick that's 8th or better. With pick protection, tanking isn't about angling for an improved chance in a raffle; it's about assuring yourself an obvious outcome.

And before the Warriors, it wasn't standard practice to lose on behalf of later lottery hopes. In a post-Barnes world, you'd better believe that teams will squander games to secure a draft pick. That is, if the NBA does nothing to prevent this from happening.

To my mind, the solution is simple: Ban pick protection. If a team wants to trade a pick, they'll just have to risk that the pick becomes a No. 1 selection. Tough. Insulating general managers from risk isn't worth subjecting fans to months of intentional losing. Don't fault the Warriors; fault the system that compels a franchise to favor security over dignity.

The NBA sent around the most interesting list:

1. George Karl 404
2. Erik Spoelstra 190
3. Mike Woodson 127
4. Gregg Popovich 120
5. Frank Vogel 60
6. Lionel Hollins 55
7. Mark Jackson 47
8. Tom Thibodeau 40
9. Kevin McHale 17
10. P.J. Carlesimo 8
11. Vinny Del Negro 8
12. Larry Drew 6
13. Doc Rivers 4
14. Scott Brooks 3

What is that exactly? The final tallies of a marathon night of pingpong at some offseason association meeting for coaches? The results of some kind of snooker tournament?

No, no. It's none of that. Those are the final scores of this year's NBA Coach of the Year voting.

OK.

A selected smattering of Twitter responses:

• "Awards are jokes."
• "Facepalm."
• "WHAT THE BLOODY HELL."
• "I quit."
• "That's criminal."
• "Time to scrap the award."
• "LOL OMG fix this system."

Many of those comments are focused on the maligned Del Negro finishing ahead of the near-legendary Rivers, but that's only one of the many surprises on this list.

Now, here's the thing: That's voting with a history of a certain kind of logic. Sports writers and broadcasters vote, and tend not to vote for the guy they think is actually the best coach, but instead for the guy whose team was most surprisingly good.

Almost everyone agrees Phil Jackson is right there with Red Auerbach in the "best coach ever" conversation -- an assertion nicely affirmed by the Lakers' disarray in his absence. But somehow Jackson won this award only once, way back in 1996. All those years all those voters believed he was the best ... but voted for someone else.

That tells you the NBA Coach of the Year award is for something other than being the NBA's best coach.

Different question: Who's the best coach?

Wouldn't you prefer an award that really was for the best coach? Isn't that what you want to know?

There's no reason we can't have that. In fact, ESPN Forecast -- a giant panel of voters who watch the NBA closely -- is ready to give you just that. Recognizing a need for a better way to identify the best coach in the NBA, we asked them today to identify the best coach in the NBA. We used a voting and scoring system similar to the NBA's. It took only a few hours, and the San Antonio Spurs' Gregg Popovich is the runaway winner. With the results from 70 voters in, the results:

OUR NEW PREDICTION ENGINE



The results for "Best coach in the NBA" powered by ESPN Forecast.

1. Gregg Popovich 690
2. Tom Thibodeau 433
3. Doc Rivers 262
4. Rick Carlisle 169
5. Erik Spoelstra 131
6. George Karl 72
7. Rick Adelman 39
8. Lionel Hollins 38
9. Frank Vogel 20
10. Mike Woodson 8
11. Mark Jackson 5
12. Scott Brooks 4
13. Kevin McHale 1

These results are far different from the real coach of the year vote, of course. Popovich went from fourth to first. Rivers shot up the list. Carlisle and Adelman didn't get a single vote of any kind in the NBA's contest, but both are respected and on the Forecast list.

That, I suggest, is the point of this exercise. Here, if you want it, is a list that uses smart information-gathering techniques to roughly approximate who we (everyone really -- media, fans, players, owners) truly believe coaches best.

Coaching is murky and tough to vote on with conviction. The best of it happens behind closed doors and away from microphones. Assistants do a lot of what matters. It's difficult to score. Maybe Phil's roster got him a lot of those wins. Tim Duncan might be the secret sauce of Popovich's intimidating win percentage. Voters seem to have historically bet that the coach of the "little team that could" must be doing a hell of a job.

But giving the award to someone other than who we think is the best coach has robbed the award of a great deal of authority. (The list of past winners is littered with the likes of Mike Schuler and Sam Mitchell -- guys the league as a whole has decided, upon review, really are not cut out to coach in this league.)

Karl, of course, is a respected NBA lifer on both lists. That he belongs somewhere up there is beyond doubt. But at the top?

The logic of his winning works like this: The Nuggets don't have an offensive superstar. That point is in the first line of the news story about Karl's victory. By and large such teams are seen as doomed -- despite the ongoing playoff success of the similarly starless Bulls and Pacers.

In this particular case, however, it's tricky. Stat geeks loved that roster from the start, and using different approaches, John Hollinger and several others predicted the Nuggets would be this good or better. (Some stat geeks say the big thing holding that roster back was ... Karl himself.) Not to mention, David Thorpe would argue that in the second half of the season, the Nuggets absolutely did have an offensive star, and his name is Ty Lawson.

Whether you buy what Hollinger or Thorpe had to say, I suspect you'll agree when I say the NBA's results do not really reflect who we truly believe are the best coaches in the NBA. Not these names, not in that order. If you owned a team, would you really pursue Karl over Popovich? Would you call Frank Vogel before Tom Thibodeau? Would you blow off calls from Rivers in favor of Del Negro? (Would you forget entirely recent championship- and award-winner Rick Carlisle?)

The big crime here, of course, is that the NBA's results, while satisfying a certain itch to reward surprising performance, are not anybody's real list of who is the best coach in the NBA.

And isn't that what this award ought to be?

Could the 3-point shot be the key to a better life? Yes. At least that’s what some of the nation’s leading minds think.

As we know, the engine of success is innovation. At HoopIdea, we’re trying to make sure that the right kind of innovation takes root and improves the game we love.

It wouldn't be the first time.

The cover of this weekend's New York Times magazine features a big story about the United States economy. Writer Adam Davidson does a masterful job of laying out many key issues, and then convincing leading economists from each side of the debate -- Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard -- to sit down together and articulate our best thinking about how to solve the future.

And you know what comes up again and again?

Basketball, of all things.

We get to hang out with Summers as he shoots hoops, and learn that he grew up in the same school district as Kobe Bryant. And that's not even the heavy-duty basketball part.

Then we meet Hubbard:

Before a crowded lecture hall at Columbia University, the economist and former adviser to both Bush presidents, Glenn Hubbard, wrote a series of words on the blackboard. Among them: Milton Friedman, Yeats, basketball. Hubbard, a mild and genial man, looks as if he entered the world fully formed, wearing a conservative suit with a side part in his hair and an accountant’s pair of thick eyeglasses. Close your eyes and picture an economist — that’s Hubbard. For the next hour, he maintained an oddly cheery tone as he laid out a dystopian vision of the United States’ economic future. He ticked off a series of empires — Rome, medieval China, Spain, 19th-century Britain — and argued that they fell because their leadership ossified and squashed free trade, technological progress or other forces of economic growth.

Hubbard fears that the United States is also veering away from the forces that made it grow into the world’s most powerful economy. Rather than corrupt Roman senators or courtly Spanish twits, he argued, our culprits are myopic politicians who are creating a middle-class entitlement state. If those politicians don’t make fundamental changes to lower our debt — especially by changing the rules governing increasingly expensive Social Security and Medicare policies — the United States may collapse, too.

As he wrapped up, Hubbard pointed to the good news: results can change when the right adjustments are made. This is where he brought up basketball. By the 1940s, he said, the sport had become boring, dominated by extremely tall players who planted themselves next to the rim. Then a Columbia University graduate student who also coached basketball wrote a Ph.D. dissertation arguing that the game could be saved by innovations, like the 3-point shot, which created an incentive to move action away from the hoop. It took decades for the N.B.A. to adopt the 3-pointer, but since its implementation, it has helped make basketball one of the most popular and lucrative sports on earth.

The U.S. economy, in other words, desperately needs to find its own 3-point shot.

Four big HoopIdea points:

• A near-perfect illustration of the HoopIdea motto, that basketball is the best game on earth ... now let's make it better. Hell yes, changing the game makes sense ... if the idea is right.
• Is wondering about how the game could be better a waste of time? According to Hubbard, people doing just that have already saved the sport once -- and are role models for the leaders of the free world.
• The best thing leadership can do is make sure it doesn't become "ossified." What was the cost of coming to the 3 decades after the idea emerged? How many mistakes like that can the league tolerate?
• Don't you love the idea of basketball being open-minded and nimble in a way a leading economist says the whole nation should emulate?

The OKC Thunder might feel ashamed Thursday.

But as Robin Williams said to Matt Damon, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

Yes, it’s hard to blame the players for intentionally fouling Houston center Omer Asik seven times in two minutes Wednesday night, plus one other intentional foul that wasn’t called and two other shooting fouls in the fourth quarter.

The players were following orders: Stop the game because we don’t like how it’s going; don’t compete on the floor because you’re not good enough to win this playoff home game against the No. 8 seed; do not try for steals and blocks and stops; let’s keep our own crowd out of the game; let’s not get out and run and try to come back with the second-best player in the world doing what he does best; let’s not play basketball for a while because the Rockets are better at basketball on this night.

So it’s not their fault. They never had a real chance. They never had a real chance at a thriller of a comeback win. They never had a chance to do the thing they’ve trained their entire lives to do. They didn’t even get 48 minutes to show fans watching in the arena and on TNT and around the world that they could win Game 5 on talent.

How many times will we get to see Kevin Durant try to lead a series-clinching comeback win in the final five minutes of a nationally televised Game 5? Not many, and that rare opportunity Wednesday night was taken from us, and from him. With OKC stopping the clock and letting Houston set up its defense, Durant didn’t score a single point in the fourth quarter.

And it’s hard to blame Thunder coach Scott Brooks for trying to win (even if the strategy itself was dumb).

Can somebody explain to me why this hack–a–stuff is fun to watch? @hoopidea

— Michael DeCicco (@mdecicco17) May 2, 2013

@hoopidea change the rule on the "hack-a-(insert player here)" strategy. This isn't fun ball for anyone to watch! Especially w/ 5+ min left!

— Daren Simmons (@DarenSimmons24) May 2, 2013

But it’s easy to blame a system that puts the game in the hands of the coaches and referees and the rulebook instead of the players.

The league has an enormous amount of intentional fouling of all kinds. The league continues to say it has the best athletes in the world.

It’s amazing that it would reward fouling at the expense of those athletes.

Obviously, the entire sport and the league’s reputation for excitement are built on the fact those great athletes can do amazing things -- and built on those amazing things happening during live play and not at the free throw line or in a boardroom somewhere with the suits making rules that give coaches more control over the game.

And while physical play is to be expected when bodies compete for space and the ball and baskets, there simply is no reason to reward intentional violence and intentional fouling. There is no reason to encourage coaches to take the game out of the hands of their players because the rulebook gives them another way to “win.”

The NBA is the greatest basketball league in the world, without a doubt. Sooner or later, it will stop rewarding intentional violence and intentional fouls, as other basketball leagues have done.

You often hear, especially in the playoffs, we should let the players decide the game. Amen.

On video, it looks like strategy.

Stephen Curry, the NBA's newest and slightest superstar, who has been killing the Nuggets on ankles so brittle he recently tweeted "no ankle left unturned lol," was minding his own business, jogging through the lane three-and-a-half minutes into Game 5, when the Nuggets' Kenneth Faried stepped backward, directly into Curry's tender foot.

It wasn't an isolated event.

"Three or four plays in the first four minutes," estimates Curry, who says "of course" the Nuggets were trying to rough him up.

I knew this was coming. Intentional fouls, I've been increasingly realizing, are the go-to method of controlling superstars. Curry, with a skinny build and weak ankles, is more vulnerable than anybody. As he emerged as a player who could decide a series, the clock was ticking. He would get roughed up. It made too much sense.

"Some dirty plays early," pointed out Curry's coach, Mark Jackson, who later said this of Faried: "Take a look ... the screen on Curry by the foul line is a shot at his ankle. Clearly. That can't be debated. ... I've got inside information that some people don't like that brand of basketball and they clearly didn't co-sign it. So they wanted me to know they had no parts in what was taking place."

Jackson -- whose team has committed all kinds of hard fouls in this series (ask Andre Iguodala about Andrew Bogut) and this season, including some that caused injury -- spoke passionately in defense of hard play, and even hard fouls. But he stressed it was important for both teams to go to the trouble to avoid injuring each other.

On TNT later, Charles Barkley explained: "I've been on teams where you say ... this dude's too comfortable. Every time you get a chance, hit him. You want him to be thinking about 'Where am I going to get hit at next time?' You can't go out there like you're at a shootaround."

Shaquille O'Neal heartily co-signed, saying Jackson went too far in calling such a thing "dirty," insisting instead it's just the nature of the game. (Every retired player will tell you it was way rougher when they played. That's what they do, even though there's little evidence the game was really more physical back then.)

Here's the thing, though: Forget the teams for a second. Forget rooting for Denver or Golden State. Forget the tail-chasing debate about what's "dirty."

Put yourselves in the position of the people who are charged with keeping players safe: The NBA. They're the ones who have fallen asleep on the job here.

If you're the NBA, or any fan of basketball, you want nothing more than for Curry -- the most exciting player in these playoffs -- to keep creating artistic moments that fire the imagination. You want to see skilled players doing the skilled things that make this league unique, and distinct from MMA. You want this for every player.

In short, you don't want to see Curry play his best in Game 6 only if he proves his ankles can withstand intentional attack. (We already know they probably can't ... he has missed dozens of games from plays with no contact at all.) You want him at his best in Game 6 because the other team is not "hitting him every chance they get."

And we could have that, right now.

Teams are roughing up opposing stars because it works. It works because many intentional fouls are missed entirely by the referees, and those that are noticed, even dangerous ones, are punished too lightly to make it stop.

Barkley and O'Neal played in an NBA where there was no strategic reason not to rough a guy like Curry up. You "hit" him 10 times a night as a team, you get called for four or five. That's the cost. The benefit is he is intimidated, fearing for safety, and diminished as a scoring threat all night long, for every play of his night. The benefit is bigger than the cost! Someone with SportVu data can probably do the math: Six or seven extra free throws is a small price to pay for a dozen extra hits -- many uncalled -- that result in a cowed, hobbled or injured opposing star. That's a fantastic trade for the more aggressive team.

That's "playoff basketball."

No coach will go on record against it. They want the ability to hit players early and often, both because it's a valuable tactic for a team and because it's a particularly valuable tactic for coaches. Intentional fouls take power from superstars -- who'd dominate even more without fear of injury -- and give it to he who can order up the hits.

The problem, though, is that it's 2013, and the league has more than enough tools, right now, to clean all of this up. Getting away scot-free with a lot of cheap shots is a key reason this is a winning strategy. But why, in a world where every court is encircled by cameras, where everyone at home benefits from truly instant HD replay from all kinds of angles, would the people making the key decisions of the game not have real-time access to that crucial information? Why would we shrug and say "we can't catch 'em all" when we totally can?

You have no idea how many times a night, thanks to the magic of watching ESPN or TNT in HD with a remote control in my hand, I know precisely whether there was a foul or not, even as the referees have no idea. It's crazy. And it makes the NBA look crazy. Why do the people with the beer and the popcorn on the couch have better real-time information than the people making game-deciding calls?

NBA referees are the best in the world, but everybody thinks they're terrible because of this. And meanwhile, the game is not being called nearly as accurately, quickly or comprehensively as it could be.

My HoopIdea: Get away from stopping the game for video review. And graduate to a courtside referee or two, with as many TV screens as would be helpful, showing every angle imaginable. This video referee crew would constantly review all the best angles of what is happening right now as it happens. They might be a few seconds behind real time if they need to rewind briefly, but not much. They'd essentially know everything video could know, without having to stop the game to huddle around a single monitor. And when they know something the referees on the court missed, they'd be able to tell them at the next dead ball, or even sooner.

The plays where the video makes the referees look foolish ... they're usually at dead balls anyway.

Before you tell me this is loco, realize the league already does this. They review the games after they're over, for instance a whole day later. And then they "correct" the referees' work when it was egregiously wrong, either by apologizing for a missed call, and then warning, fining or suspending somebody for a flop, a dirty play, fighting or anything else.

I'm baffled by the delay. Players are hitting each other as part of team-wide strategy -- endorsed by Barkley, O'Neal and oddly, even Mark Jackson -- because they help them win games.

As long as the real punishment only comes after the game, there are still wins to be had for teams who are beating people up. Whatever the NBA believes can be gleaned from video, glean it when it's still useful to decide the game, when it's still useful to keep up with the fans at home, and to make the strategy of Tackle Basketball stop working.

The league's executives, from David Stern to Stu Jackson, have been clear they do not want teams taking the floor planning to hurt each other. Time to do something about it.

A press release from the NBA:

The NBA has set the league’s anti-flopping disciplinary schedule to be used during the 2013 Playoffs, NBA Executive Vice President, Basketball Operations Stu Jackson announced today.

“Flopping” is defined as any physical act that appears to have been intended to cause the referees to call a foul on another player. The primary factor in determining whether a player committed a flop is whether his physical reaction to contact with another player is inconsistent with what would reasonably be expected given the force or direction of the contact.

The NBA’s anti-flopping rule, adopted at the beginning of the 2012-13 season, had 24 violations during the 2012-13 regular season. Fourteen players received warnings while five players received a $5,000 fine for violating the anti-flopping rule twice.

Physical acts that constitute legitimate basketball plays (such as moving to a spot in order to draw an offensive foul) and minor physical reactions to contact are not deemed to be flops.

Any player who is determined to have committed a flop during the 2013 Playoffs will be subject to the following:

• Violation 1: $5,000 fine
• Violation 2: $10,000 fine
• Violation 3: $15,000 fine
• Violation 4: $30,000 fine

If a player violates the anti-flopping rule five times or more, he will be subject to discipline that is reasonable under the circumstances, including an increased fine and/or suspension.

This is not so different from the league's regular-season anti-flopping program, although a key difference is that in the regular season every player's first offense was granted with only a warning. Now the fines start immediately and quickly get steep.

Whether or not such a program is effective depends entirely on how active the league is in noticing and punishing flops.

In the regular season they spotted one flop for every 51 games played. (That's one for roughly every 25,000 minutes of player time on the court.) At that rate, the whole playoffs will feature a grand total of two flops. In other words, the entire anti-flopping effort would amount to a couple of $5,000 holes in a couple of guys' wallets -- but no real need for any flopper to change strategy.

There are other ways the flopping program could be better. Why wait until after the game is over to review three seconds of video that affect the game in real time? That delay means, for instance, that effectively there are no flopping rules worth worrying about for any team facing elimination. Or, picture Game 7 of the NBA Finals, when any flop would be punished next season. Flop away, gentlemen.

And finally, I'm not a fan of any of these NBA rules (for instance, with technical totals) that accumulate through the playoffs. The risk of a five-flops-in-the-playoffs suspension is effectively zero for every NBA player -- except maybe those on very top contending teams that expect to play a couple dozen games. If you play for the Thunder, Spurs or Heat, in other words, you're facing anti-flopping, anti-technical and anti-flagrant pressure no other team has. It also means that if anyone is to get suspended, it's most likely in the Finals, when fans would most appreciate having them on the court.

Hardly seems like the smartest set up, but of course it's better than no punishment at all -- which is how the NBA treated flops before this season.

Bravo, Slate, for this wonderful bit of Flop theater.

LOS ANGELES -- Give the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets their due, the two teams played a frenetic, de facto playoff game. The Rockets ran the floor with abandon, fanning out in transition like birds in flight, and injecting the game with even more chaos than normal. The Lakers played a gutty game despite shooting the ball terribly. Whatever the Lakers lacked in proficiency, Pau Gasol made up for in moxie -- 17 points, 20 rebounds, 11 dimes. Dwight Howard’s presence underneath neutered the Rockets’ drive-and-kick game, as the Lakers prevailed 99-95 in overtime.

All 30 NBA teams were in action on Wednesday night, but “in action” is a term of art in April. The roster of notables who sat out the final night of the regular season: LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, David West, Paul George, Kevin Garnett, J.R. Smith, Roy Hibbert, Jason Terry, Jason Kidd, Al Horford, Tyson Chandler, Josh Smith, Nicolas Batum, Jeff Teague, Kyle Korver, Wesley Matthews and Goran Dragic. That doesn't include players such as Kobe Bryant, Kenneth Faried and Danilo Gallinari, each of whom suffered late-season injuries, nor Tim Duncan and Tony Parker, who left a very tight game in the third quarter, never to return.

Apart from the Lakers-Rockets buzzfest, the Utah Jazz played a sudden-death game at Memphis, while the Los Angeles Clippers and Sacramento Kings clashed in a competitive game at Sleep Train Arena. Beyond that, it was formalities.

A few of these absences have been chalked up to injuries of unknown severity, but most of the names on the list are game-ready. Wednesday night was the most egregious example of NBA truancy, but this isn’t a recent development. For the better part of the past few weeks, teams comfortable with their playoff seedings as well as many of those who can improve draft position by tanking have been holding key players out of games.

NBA coaches and organizations aren’t the culprits here. They’ve been charged with very clear objectives -- win meaningful games, mitigate risk in meaningless ones and build the franchise with young talent. In turn, they make the personnel decisions that help achieve these goals. Injuries are a too-common occurrence in the NBA. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that players who log heavy minutes are less likely to win in June. For teams outside the playoff race, a dreadful April can catapult them up the draft board.

All that being the case, what possible motivation does an NBA team have for exposing their best players to exhaustion or injury? For a team locked into a playoff position, the best strategy is to hermetically seal stars in bubble wrap until the games matter again.

We can’t incentivize certain behavior, then be irritated when people act on those motivations. So how do we deter the rash of DNPs we see every April, when the NBA schedule is three parts filler to one part substance?

There's simply no fool-proof way to wipe out ShamBall entirely from the latter portions of the NBA schedule, but there are some smart measures to consider:

• Shorten the season: Two points here: (1) Each game shaved off the schedule increases the probability that the race for seeding will be more competitive. As a rule, a greater number of games means greater distance between teams in the standings. Most years, a 44-, 58- or 72-game season would likely create a jumble, and jumbles are good for competition. While there would certainly be seasons when a top seed (or any other seed) could be locked up early, it's simply tougher to do with fewer games. (2) There's a reason these guys are resting, they're exhausted and banged up. Fewer games mean fewer minutes, which would diminish the need for rest or healing.
• Stop giving teams a reason to tank: The current lottery system rewards failure, plain and simple. So long as that's the case, the bottom-feeders -- many of whom are no joy to watch even when they're trying -- are thinking about probabilities that improve with each loss. There are several ways to go here, ranging from the elimination of the lottery (or the draft, but I'm dreaming) to a lottery that includes all 30 teams. It could be unweighted, or even calibrated to reward success after a team has been mathematically eliminated from the playoff picture.
• Give the Bill Simmons Plan a go: "[S]tage a weeklong, single-elimination, 16-team tournament between the nonplayoff teams for the 8-seeds. (No conferences, just No. 15 through No. 30 seeded in order.) The higher seeds would host the first two rounds (eight games in all) from Sunday through Wednesday; the last two rounds (The Final FourGotten) would rotate every year in New York or Los Angeles on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, becoming something of a Fun Sports Weekend along the lines of All-Star Weekend. Friday night's winners would clinch playoff berths. Sunday's winner gets two carrots: the chance to pick their playoff conference (you can go East or West), as well as the No. 10 pick in the upcoming draft (that's a supplemental pick; they'd get their own first-rounder as well)."

April should be the climax of the NBA's regular season, a time when the game's most outstanding players are showcasing their skills as an appetizer for the postseason. That's hard to do when stars are in suits.

A few questions about intentional fouls in the NBA:

Are they good for the game?
No.

Would the game be better if players were intentionally fouled more?
Of course not.

Would the game be better if players were intentionally fouled less?
Yes.

Do intentional fouls discourage players from trying to make plays?
Yes. Research has shown this.

Is it good for the NBA if players are discouraged from making plays?
Of course not.

Do intentional fouls encourage players to play their best?
Of course not.

So intentional fouls mean we aren’t seeing the best basketball?
Obviously.

Are intentional fouls used mostly by inferior players?
Naturally, yes.

Are they used by defenders who can’t stop scorers?
Yes.

Is it fair to just grab a guy who’s beaten you?
No. Everybody who plays the game knows this.

Do intentional fouls discourage fast breaks, dunks and highlight plays?
Yes.

Are intentional fouls fun to watch?
Not usually.

Do they add to the flow of the game?
No. Quite the opposite. They kill the flow of the game.

Do they stop the game at its most exciting?
Yes, just when fans are rising from their seats.

Do they bring the game to a screeching halt?
Yes. They are a signal to fans to sit down.

Are fans more excited when the action is alive or dead?
Alive.

When the game stops, is the action usually alive or dead?
Dead.

Does anyone enjoy watching players and refs wait for action to start?
Of course not.

Does anyone enjoy watching players line up for free throws?
What do you think?

Is it fun to watch a big guy clobber a little guy?
Not usually.

Is it fun to watch a player “wrap up” another player?
Not really.

Are those basketball plays?
Not really.

Did Naismith invent the game for players to grab other players?
No.

Did Bill Russell play the game by grabbing little guys?
No.

Did Wilt Chamberlain? Did he ever foul out of an NBA game?
No. No.

Do intentional fouls bring fans into the game?
No.

Are intentional fouls safe?
No.

Are they ugly?
Yes.

Do they contribute to the artistry and creativity of the game?
No.

Do they lead to more menace and mayhem on the court?
Yes.

Are they bad for the future of the sport?
Yes.

Do they make the NBA more like pro wrestling?
Yes.

Do they make the game harder to officiate correctly?
Yes.

Are players bigger, stronger and faster than ever?
Yes.

Are intentional fouls dangerous?
Yes.

Is that part of the appeal for fans?
Of course.

Do intentional fouls cause injuries?
Yes.

Do they cause concussions?
Yes.

Do they cause players to need painkillers?
Yes.

Could they cause players to take illegal supplements and performance-enhancing drugs for recovery?
Yes.

Does the league like them?
No, but it inadvertently encourages them.

Do players like them?
No, they hate them.

Do coaches like them?
No, they love them.

Are there NBA rules against intentional fouls?
Sort of.

Are intentional fouls punished sufficiently in the NBA?
Obviously not. That’s why they happen so often.

Are intentional fouls allowed in other leagues around the world?
No, they're not.

Is there another league that encourages players to break the rules?
Maybe. If so, that’s pretty dumb.

Do the rules on intentional fouls come from a dumber, outdated era?
Yes.

Are we in a smarter, more informed era now?
Yes.

Do the current NBA rules still encourage intentional fouls?
Yes.

Is it time for change?
Yes.