“Our fans are passionate and have an intense interest in understanding how the rules are applied,” Mike Bantom, Executive Vice President of Referee Operations, said in a prepared statement. “NBA referees have the most difficult officiating job in sports, with so many split-second decisions in real time. We trust this consistent disclosure will give fans a greater appreciation of the difficulty of the job and a deeper sense of the correct interpretations of the rules of our game.”
The reports will be posted the day after games on NBA.com/official. Yahoo! Sports reports that NBA referees were not consulted on this decision.
The NBA had only discussed crunch-time referee calls internally before this decision. Transparency is always a good thing, but I expect that when a team’s fanbase thinks they got jobbed, the NBA’s ruling isn’t going to change their minds.
