It’s a phrase used by coaches all over the country…..coaches talk all the time about ‘finishing’ a drive to the basket, or ‘finishing’ a game with the same intensity and focus as the game was started with. Or, in a broader sense, ‘finishing’ a goal that was started the previous year by claiming that they have ‘unfinished business’.

One of my pet peeves about the game of basketball, is that the sport itself, does a poor job of ‘finishing’ it’s games.

Point #1: the rules of the sport change down the stretch….officials are encouraged to ‘let the kids decide’ by not calling fouls or violations. In the Duke game a couple of weeks ago…..the kid traveled twice on the game winning shot, but it wasn’t called and I heard announcers and coaches alike applaud the officials for not blowing their whistles. The kid made a great shot, showed lots of courage and determination…..but any other point in the game, the shot would have been waved off and traveling called.

I know a lot of coaches that disagree with me on this one…..but I think the ‘swallow the whistle’ mindset at the end of a game is bad for the sport. The rules literally change based on the time and score of a game…..no other sport does that.

Point #2: basketball is the only sport that intentionally doing something against the rules, is a viable strategy at the end of a game. A team is down by 6 with 2 minutes left, what starts happening? The team behind starts fouling. Way, way more often than not, it just leads to a trashy, sloppy finish instead of an exciting comeback. No other sport finishes a game like that. In baseball, the excitement grows with every out, every pitch. The game gets more exciting rather than sloppy. In football, the final possessions are played with great intensity, but generally not cheap and sloppy. If a team has the lead and the ball, the only way the defense can stop them is by making legal plays. Once time has run down, and timeouts used, the clock simply runs out with both teams standing and staring at each other the final few seconds.

Solutions: I get it, it’s human nature to want to ‘let things go’ a little bit at the end of an exciting, close game…..and to me, that is the lesser of the two problems I listed above. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is the sloppiness and trashiness that is associated with fouling at the end of a game. I don’t think you can expect coaches not to implement the strategy…..they are competitive and want to (and should) try everything they can to win the game. Plus, too often, their jobs are dependent upon wins. To me, the solution is for officials to simply call intentional fouls, intentional. Too many fans and coaches think that intentional fouls should only be called when they are committed with a certain degree of physicality……intentional fouls are considered flagrant fouls by most, and therefore not called often enough. Calling intentional fouls would give the team that was fouled 2 free throws and the ball. It would put a great deal of pressure on the defense to execute with a higher degree of effort and efficiency within the rules, instead of what we often see….sloppiness and cheap shots. It would make it more like a football finish….the only way to get the ball back is thru legal defensive efforts. And, this may seem a little odd, but I think that changing, or even getting rid of, the hand signal for an intentional foul would help. When fans and coaches see that ‘X’ thrown up above an officials head, it’s generally been a sign that something violent has happened. I think officials should just use the same signal as any common foul, then when reporting the foul, specify that it was intentional.

Basketball is an exciting, fast paced sport…..I hate to see so many games end with constant trips to the free throw line and the sloppiness and trashiness that is associated with that.