During the series between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Houston Rockets, the games have been painstakingly filled with missed free throws from Dwight Howard and Blake Griffin. Not to say that this series hasn’t been completely unwatchable with Chris Paul and James Harden going to head, but still the slowness has been waning on NBA fans.
Many fans, players and team executives around the league are wondering what the solution is to solve the “Hack-A-Jordan” strategy. Should technical fouls be assessed for intentionally fouling? Should there be fines to teams for fouling players in order to send them to the free throw line?
Simple Solution to the Hacking Strategy
The simple answers to these questions are no. Players like De’Andre Jordan and Dwight Howard should be able to hit their free throws. If penalties were to be enforced on teams that employ the “Hack strategy” it would change the integrity of the game.
What needs to happen instead is to change the number of team fouls from five to seven or eight like in college basketball. With the increased number of team fouls the game would become freer flowing with more time spent on watching the actual game of basketball instead sitting through another 10-15 minutes of time just to watch four or five minutes of game time.
The bigger picture here though is should teams be allowed to intentionally fouls players? They absolutely should and here’s why. They are free throws and players that are getting paid millions of dollars should be allowed to execute one of the basic principles of basketball. If a player can’t shoot free throws then they should not be playing professional basketball.
The NBA would do itself a great service by adding the amount of team fouls. Allow for more free flowing basketball where fouling isn’t a part of the strategy and is focused more on making reads, contesting shots and playing good defense. If a team still wants to hack De’Andre Jordan then by all means do so. Jordan will be at the line and the end of the bench will become depleted. At the end of the day all fans want to do is watch a good game and not feel like they are watching an extra inning baseball game.
