The Next “Big Thing”

Todd Warnick
Commissioner for the Israeli league
Commissioner, instructor and evaluator for the International Basketball Federation (FIBA).

I just got back from one of my son’s basketball games, witnessing once again another terrible display of dribbling the basketball – “palming” the ball, starting and stopping dribbles illegally – in short, absolutely awful dribbling fundamentals.

The truth is that I have been watching illegal dribbling at all levels – from mini-basket to adult men – for all too many years. And we only have us, the referees, to blame for not cracking down on this problem until now.

The problem of illegal dribbling started across the ocean sometime in the 1980’s on the playgrounds of the United States and moved on to college campuses and into the NBA, where players such as Allen Iverson (now of the Denver Nuggets) turned illegal crossover moves into an art form. As we always say, “Players will do what you allow them to do”, and in this case, as long as they weren’t called for a violation, they continued to dribble illegally to their hearts’ content.

Finally, both the NCAA and NBA made illegal dribbling a point of emphasis this past year and began calling players for this violation (I personally saw one game San Antonio game on TV early in the season where I counted 8 illegal dribble calls). As we also know, players also adjust very quickly to how we are calling the game, and once the referees in these leagues started to make this call, they started to dribble properly and legally.

As many trends in basketball start in the US, my prediction is that we are going to have to start paying more attention to this aspect, if also because US players now coming to Europe are going to start questioning why this call is being made in America and not here.

Here are my favorite dribbling “violations” that we aren’t calling:

1. The “hesitation” move: Player A1 is being guarded by B1 when he stops his dribble and holds the ball in his palm momentarily. B1, thinking that A1 has finished his dribble, takes a step forward to guard him more closely. A1 now has B1 off-balance and quickly puts the ball back on to the floor and penetrates past him for a shot or lay-up.

2. The variation on the “hesitation” move is the “fake”: A1 throws a head-fake and at the same time carries the ball – and then continues forward with his dribble.

3. The “double-touch”: A1 does a crossover move and passes the ball quickly from one hand to another without the ball touching the floor first – and then he continues his dribble.

One of the things that I started to notice in my last few years of officiating, was that all too often I was given a game ball to approve (and I often sent it back for more air) that didn’t bounce high enough, i.e. from 1.80m, the ball is supposed to bounce between 1.20m and 1.40m high – which on a referee whose height is 1.75m – 1.85m, is at least somewhere above the naval. Point guards many times want a ball that they can control, and if it’s too “soft”, i.e. it doesn’t bounce properly, there is no way to dribble the ball without palming it on a regular basis.

We can help ourselves and the game by making sure that the game ball has an appropriate level of air, which will not give players an excuse for not dribbling the ball properly. We can then begin to identify the illegal dribble and call the play accordingly.

Illegal dribbling has reached all the way down to the youngest levels of basketball, and referees have a role in educating the players, coaches and fans in the proper fundamentals of the game. Like anything else in our game, whether it’s hand-checking, illegal screens or illegal dribbling, once we begin to consistently make the right call, players adjust very quickly.