Chris Paul's Crafty Jump Ball

¹²³ · Dec 18, 2008

The Hornets were leading, but the Spurs are cool customers who get stops and hit 3s. If the Spurs won this tap, basketball fans everywhere knew, somehow this was going to get complicated.

Niall Doherty of Hornets247:

"Our guys came up with some mighty big plays in this one. Perhaps none was bigger than the 6-0 Chris Paul winning a jump ball against the 6-6 Manu Ginobili with 24 seconds left and the Hornets clinging to a 4-point lead. There are so many things that Chris Paul shouldn't be able to do, but he just goes ahead and does them anyway. He'll probably cure cancer when he's done with the basketball thing."

I saw it with my own eyes, and still wasn't sure I had seen it. Chris Paul won that jump ball, and somehow he won it easily. Then the Spurs had to foul, and the game was essentially over.

TrueHoop reader Samuel, however, noticed something about that jump ball. When he first e-mailed me, I thought he was clearly a Spurs fan, or someone with an axe to grind. But I watched that play again and again in slow motion, and I consulted the rule book. And Samuel appears to be exactly right when he e-mails:

"Check out how Chris Paul made sure he won that jump ball at the end of the Hornets-Spurs game last night. He fakes a "false start" but doesn't go all the way back to his original position, he stays closer and then wins it easily against Ginobili, who has about 5 inches on CP3. You can tell its a trick too, because he actually has to do it twice -- the ref sets up, he fakes the false start, but the ref resets so he goes all the way back. Then, as the ref is about to release again, Paul does another fake false start, the ref tosses it without resetting, Paul doesn't move back, and he wins."

The NBA rule book says that jumpers have to stay in their half of the circle until the ball has been tapped. But by the time that ball was tossed by referee James Capers, Paul was coiled and ready to spring, with his right foot entirely in Ginobili's half of the circle. By jumping slightly earlier than Ginobili, Paul got his torso in the airspace above the Spur, so when Ginobili jumped and extended skyward, he collided with Paul, who who was obstructing his path to the ball.

After watching the whole thing in slow motion, I was not at all surprised to see that at the next dead ball, Ginobili beat a path directly to Capers to complain.
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Chris Paul's Crafty Jump Ball

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