Dr. Naismith's Lament

Five seconds left in the game, and Princeton, ahead by a point, has the ball, The Ivy title's on the line, and Harvard is playing superhuman defense. Tiger point guard Gary Knapp looks around in wild desperation--there's no-one open, no-one at all. Finally it comes, the referee's whistle. And everyone's on their feet, screaming, as the ref tosses up the jump ball that could decide the game.

Five seconds left in the game, and Princeton, ahead by a point, has the ball. The Ivy title's on the line, and Harvard's playing superhuman defense. Tiger point guard Gary Knapp looks around in wild desperation--there's no-one open, no-one at all. Finally it comes, the referee's whistle. And everyone whirls to look at a little arrow on the scorer's table. It's pointing at Princeton, and the game is all but over.

The first scenario is basketball pretty much as it has been played since the turn of the century; the second is basketball as its been played on the collegiate level since the start of this season.

Following the dictum of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), athletic directors all across the country have been purchasing "possession indicators," little scoreboards with a pair of illuminated arrows pointing in opposite direction. After the game-opening jump ball, the lighted arrow points toward the team that lost the jump; the next time a jump ball situation develops, that team just takes the ball out of bounds; for the rest of the game, the all-powerful arrow alternates back and forth after each jump situation.

In other words, the jump ball no longer exists except at the start of the contest.

What happened? "There were a lot of complaints that officials were not performing the toss-up technique very well," Bruce Howard of the NCAA explains. Not only that, adds NCAA rules committee secretary Ed Steitz, "some people felt the jump ball played right into the hands of the teams with seven footers, the 7-foot-2 players.

And so--after a couple of seasons of experimentation in the Atlantic Coast, Southwest and Big Eight conferences--the NCAA adopted the rule. A month into the campaign. Crimson mentor Frank McLaughlin says he understands the rule, but thinks with some modifications it might work better.

"The kids got taller and taller, jump balls were getting tougher. There were a lot of violations." McLaughlin says. Harvard center forward Monroe Trout, who has soared rafterward for all eight Harvard jump balls this season, adds, "people jump so quickly, trying to steal the tap--there was a lot of confusion."

UCLA, for one, has already tasted the arbitrariness of the rule. Twice in the first month of the season, once against Brigham Young and again versus Rutgers, it played gutsy late defense, forced a jump, and then watched it mean nothing. The arrow was pointing the wrong way.

And to judge from the murmurs around the IAB when announcer Rob Storch tries to explain the new rule each game, the fans are decidedly unhappy. It's not just that the rule makes the ends of games less exciting by encouraging a stall offense. It's not just that it breaks the flow of the action. It's not just that it prevents those classic shuffling-big-guy-scrappy-little-guy confrontations. It's all those and more. Somehow the rule just isn't quite right.

When Dr. Naismith invented basket-ball, he would throw the ball in from the sideline towards all ten players. Soon he moved towards the center circle jump, which became a central feature of the game. Something's missing without it, like football would be with no punting (which, after all, aids the team with good kickers) or hockey with no faceoff (more dangerous for the ref to handle than a jump ball).

At any rate, the NCAA won't carry its reasoning too far. Rebounds, after all, are made for seven-footers. And then there's those personal fouls--you can find people who'll say the refs are pretty poor in whistling those.