This year the NBA has implemented new rules in an attempt to mitigate the amount of flopping that goes on in the league. When the refs judge that a player is flopping they will call a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul and award the other team a free throw. The players who are called for flopping will also be 2,000 dollars for the first offense and the fines will increase for repeat offenders.
According to Spotrac there have been 15 flopping fines given out by the league this year. The offenders have ranged from role players like Jevon Carter to the 2 time MVP Nikola Jokic. (I’m not sure if these means that there have been 15 flopping calls so far this year because it was a big deal that Lebron was called for flopping but his name does not appear on the fines list so either not everyone who gets called gets fined or Lebron got his rescinded).
Despite the fact that the NBA is making this effort to curtail the flopping, the games look mostly similar to what they looked like last year. The refs are able to identify and call some of the more egregious flopping but a lot of what fans and media are most annoyed by is is seeing players on offense initiate contact and then throw the ball wildly in the air to draw the foul or when players on drives whip their heads back like they’d been elbowed in the face basically when players put more effort into drawing fouls than actually trying to put the ball in the basket.
In the past the NBA has instructed officials to stop calling certain plays fouls, a few years ago they stopped calling the rip through a shooting foul and years before that they stopped calling the Reggie Miller leg kick a foul. And last season the NBA said they would stop calling fouls when the offensive player launched himself into the defender and burped the ball in the air for a call. The officials stuck to that for about 6 weeks and then went right back to calling them. I wish they had stuck to not calling them but I do sympathize that this brand of flopping for fouls is perhaps harder to not call. Players like Trae Young and Joel Embiid are very good at creating a lot of contact and when there is a lot of contact officials feel like they need to blow their whistles.
So here is a quarter baked idea on how the NBA can get players to stop flopping.
Free throws should not count toward your individual point total.
My proposed idea is that the points that players get from free throws would get logged in the box score as a team stat called FTP or “Free Throw Points” and it would be entirely separate from individual player box scores.
So for example right now if Trae Young goes 5/12 from the field for 11 points and 13/13 from the free throw line he gets credit for 24 points for that game which is a pretty good night but with my proposed stat keeping change he would only get credit for 11 points and the other 13 would be accounted for as part of the team FTP stat.
No matter which stat keeping method you use Trae Young’s impact on that game was the same and there would be lot’s of advanced stats and tracking data that would show that Trae Young had a good game the only difference is that if you use my stat keeping method at the end of the game Trae has see in the box score that he only scored 11 points.
The idea behind this change is that players like Trae Young and Joel Embiid who are used to averaging over 20 or 30 ppg thanks to a healthy diet of free throws will not like to see their points per game be so low and as a result will try to score actual points from the field rather than throw themselves into defenders and fling the ball wildly into the air.
Players always say that winning is what is most important to them but I think the unspoken part of them saying that is: winning is the most important thing as long as I get my numbers and my money.
When players flop for calls it is because they are trying to score. Scoring serves an NBA player in 2 ways, it helps their team win and it contributes to their individual stats. Individual stats are important to players because that impacts their money and how they are perceived around the league by fans and media.
Frequent floppers have an arsenal of moves that they deploy to get the refs to blow the whistle. They have worked on these moves and perfected them to the point where if they get into their foul drawing bag they can almost guarantee themselves a trip to the free throw line. This level of foul drawing mastery creates situations where it is easier to score by flopping for a call then by trying to get past the defenders and actually score.
In those moments the player is incentivized by the officials to flop. It’s the easiest way to score and why would you not do something the easy way? The motivating factor of helping the team win and boosting your stats are both there and the officials can’t wait to blow the whistle. Flopping gets the player everything they could ever want.
My proposed stat keeping adjustment removes one of the key motivations to flop which is the chance to boost your individual stats. With free throw points no longer contributing to a player’s ppg the internal motivation to flop is significantly lessened. Yes the team still gets the points and the advantage in the game but now the player gets no credit in the box score. The motivation to flop is cut in half and flopping is no longer the way for the player to get everything they could ever want.
I get that this sounds extreme but the only people who would be really upset about it are the players who go into every game expecting to get 8-12 points from the free throw line.
If you are concerned about history the NBA has done a great job tracking free throws for a long time so it would be easy to go back and see what everyone was averaging with their free throws removed from their ppg totals.
Here are some fun before and after FTPs
Here are the all time leading scorers
Lebron James
Career: 27.2 -> 21.5
Highest Scoring Season: 30.3 -> 25.8 (It’s crazy Lebron’s highest scoring season was in years 19)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Career: 24.6 -> 20.3
Highest Scoring Season: 34.8 -> 28.6 (Kareem is confirmed not a free throw moment)
Karl Malone
Career: 25 -> 18.4
Highest Scoring Season: 31 -> 22.5
Kobe Bryant
Career: 25 -> 18.8
Highest Scoring Season: 35.4 -> 25.2
Michael Jordan
Career: 30.1 -> 23.3
Highest Scoring Season: 37.1 -> 26.9
Dirk Nowitzki
Career: 20.7 -> 15.9
Highest Scoring Season: 26.6 -> 19.2
Wilt Chamberlain
Career: 30.1 -> 24.3
Highest Scoring Season: 50.4 -> 40 (Just wow)
Shaquille O’Neal
Career: 23.7 -> 18.8
Highest Scoring Season: 29.7 -> 19.3
Carmelo Anthony
Career: 22.5 -> 17.5
Highest Scoring Season: 28.9 -> 21.8
Kevin Durant
Career: 27.3 -> 20.6
Highest Scoring Season: 32 -> 22.1
And here is last year’s First and Second All NBA Teams
Joel Embiid: 33.1 -> 23.1
Giannis Attentekoumpo: 31.1 -> 23.2
Jayson Tatum: 30.1 -> 22.9
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander: 31.4 -> 21.6
Luka Doncic: 32.4 -> 24.6
Nikola Jokic: 24.5 -> 19.6
Jimmy Butler: 22.9 -> 15.5
Jaylen Brown: 26.6 -> 22.7
Steph Curry: 29.4 -> 24.8
Donovan Mitchell: 28.3 -> 23.6
IDK how to end this I’m just rambling at this point.
The Dishwasher 
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