Tag: Monty McCutchen

Seeing NBA officials go to the replay center at midcourt has become a commonplace yet frustrating aspect of these playoffs, with refs determining if contact is worth a flagrant foul. What’s a flagrant? Is it a Flagrant 2? What happened to the hard playoff foul, to reasonably stop a player from scoring on a touch foul and going for a 3-point play? The interpretations of the rules have changed through the years and with multiple camera angles equipped in every arena, there’s no lack of officiating experts at home or in the stands.

Monty McCutchen was a longtime official and now works in the league office as head of officiating. He spoke to Yahoo Sports recently, addressing concerns that have been on full display over the past few weeks. The data shows the officials are blowing the whistle more but getting more calls right, even though McCutchen admits he understands the frustration with the frequency of reviews. “I do think it’s a fair criticism,” McCutchen said to Yahoo Sports. “I would say then, that we’re sort of betwixt, in between a rock and a hard place there. Based on our desire for the health of our players. It is a difficult spot for our referees to be in. Do I think we’ve gone a couple of times when we didn’t need to? Yes, I do. And we try to train and calibrate that. “And the reason we’re blowing our whistle more is because the play is more and more assertive and more aggressive. And in some cases, even rough.”

It seems obvious when the notion is presented aloud, but it’s not that there’s more rough play — there’s just less congestion for incidental contact. Almost everything has to be done with intention, thus blurring the lines. “It’s hard to get windup and impact when all 10 players are playing in the paint like Charles Barkley did,” McCutchen told Yahoo Sports. “But when you start playing in space, you get a lot more of the [Memphis wing] Dillon Brooks chase down, a lot more of the layup where someone is recovering like [Dallas’] Dorian Finney-Smith.”

ESPN reported that more than a third of the league’s referees were in COVID protocols at the end of December. But, as with players and coaches, the regular referees are, slowly, coming back. “We’re coming out of the worst of it,” NBA Senior Vice President, Head of Referee Development and Training Monty McCutchen said Tuesday, noting the combination of vaccines and boosters — all required by the league for officials to work NBA games this season — along with the antibodies produced in healthy people who have gotten the vaccines and boosters but nonetheless test positive. “That being said, we’ve had to lean on other people,” he said. “And we’ve been proud of their work. … We’ve lost, it seems to me, this ability to allow people a proper apprenticeship. We tend to want our first-year players to be immediate successes. We want our first-year coaches to be immediate successes. And, of course, refereeing is always judged up against this unreasonable standard of perfection, instead of where are they on their arc, and are they doing excellent for that arc of growth?”

The optics of fair play is especially important in an unprecedented environment. “Robert Frost, a great poet, once wrote, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’” McCutchen told the Daily News over the phone Thursday. “Look, our players and coaches and referees here are very professional. If they were to run into each other, no one is going to be talking about the calls last night. Our players are too classy, our coaches are too classy, for that. That being said, in the age of cell phones, if you happen to run into each other, and you both smile as you said, ‘Hello,’ that smile on a cell phone could be interpreted a million different ways in people’s eyes. So we are in a different hotel.”

McCutchen anticipates hiccups. He also explained the difference acceptable profanity and technical-worthy profanity. “Grammar becomes very important,” he said. “‘You’re full of s–t’ is a lot different than, ‘Oh, c’mon Monty, that’s bulls–t.’ The former is definitely a technical foul, the latter maybe not so much at a low volume. I think collaboratively we’ll figure that out. Could there be some rough spots and bumps? Sure, it’s competition. But we won’t hold that against anybody.”

It will largely be business as usual for referees — though with two notable differences. The first of those is how the NBA Replay Center will still be operating in Secaucus, New Jersey, but the referees assigned with actually assisting in those situations will be on-site at Disney. The reason is because it didn’t make much logistical sense to send referees into the greater New York City area and have them adhere to local guidelines there by quarantining for 14 days before working games.

At Disney, there will be no fans and that means some off-color talks might get picked up on broadcasts. McCutchen isn’t worried. “We’ll look for a collaboration with coaches and players and I think coaches and players, they’ll figure out how to communicate,” McCutchen said. “A lot of yelling that goes on does go on because there’s crowd noise and in a passionate moment you want to be heard you want to be listened to. Without the crowd there, I expect our players and coaches to have an occasional burst, but because they can be heard in a different way, they will communicate in a different way.”