<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">ORLANDO - Brendan Haywood is a mountain of a man at 7 feet, 263 pounds. Yet when opposing center Dwight Howard turned into him -- lightly by Howard's standards, mind you -- Haywood's body went sprawling as if he'd been blasted with an elephant gun. Once he picked himself up off the floor, Haywood couldn't help but smile and giggle all the way back up the court at the caper he had just pulled off. With theatrics worthy of an Oscar fooling referees into thinking that Haywood had been unmercifully plowed into, they whistled Howard with a charging foul. A scene like the one between Howard and Haywood has become all too familiar in the NBA these days, to the point that the league is considering adapting legislation to ban "flopping."At times, it's as though a European soccer game has broken out what with the way players fall flailing to the floor only to get up seconds later and sprint back up the court. Coaches have been asking the league for the past few years to clean up the flopping, and referees have sought authority to hand out stiffer penalties for players faking contact in hopes of drawing offensive fouls. Finally, the league appears to be taking the increasing problem seriously. "I think all of the coaches are in agreement because it's the number one topic at all of our meetings," said Orlando Magic coach Brian Hill. "It's absolutely destroying the game with guys just falling down trying to get calls." The league is using this season as a case study trying to determine how often flopping occurs in a game. Then, there's the issue of whether or not a referee can tell the difference between a legitimate charging foul and when a player makes the contact look worse than it really is by flopping to the court. Often, they are easy to detect on the super slow-motion replays from television, but at game speed, differentiating can be tricky. "They're really difficult to determine in real time. They're meant to fool an official," NBA executive vice president Stu Jackson said earlier this season in a meeting with reporters. "Are we going to be wrong more times than not? It's tough, but we're looking at it." The NBA is considering giving referees the option of whistling players for technical fouls if they deem that a player has flopped in an attempt to get a call. FIBA, the governing body of all international basketball, already gives such latitude to its referees. Other sports such as soccer and the NHL already allow their referees to penalize players for purposefully falling in an attempt to deceive the game officials. Howard leads the league in turnovers with 236, many of them coming on questionable charging calls when a defender flops to the floor to elicit a call. Haywood has seemingly mastered the craft and led the NBA in charges taken last season. His actions have been enough to infuriate big men such as Howard and Miami Heat center Shaquille O'Neal. "If he catches the ball around the basket, you know what's coming next," Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant said. "So you have to do whatever it takes to stop him catching it there." Howard admitted having players fake contact in order to get him in foul trouble has been extremely frustrating as he's grown into a better defender. In December, Howard fouled out of a game against Phoenix after playing just 19 minutes. Oddly, all six of his fouls came on the offensive end of the floor and twice on plays that could be deemed flops. "It is frustrating when guys just flop, said Howard, 21. "They just do it because they don't want to play defense all the time.</div> Source If flopping is removed from the NBA, Dwight Howard is going to be an even better post player and his averages would go way up. I really hope the NBA gets rid of flopping because I think it's a cheap move and it gets a guy in foul trouble when they haven't even done a thing. Dwight's turnovers would drop and he would become virtually unstoppable down low.
I think making a rule against flopping would open up a new can of worms. It's all in the eyes of the refs and each ref has a different perspective, so something that happens in one game that gets called a flop would not be called in the other. Also if there is no flopping the big guys will go harder at the smaller weaker guys and would make guys like Dwight Howard and Shaq even more dominating. Of course, I don't mind since Dwight is on my team, but it's unfair to the rest of the league and the competition level would go down, IMO.
Lets be honest, between Anderson V. and Nene they were on their backs more than a $10 hooker... Getting "some" of the calls right is crap, each turnover or should i say "flop" cost the team a position and ultimately can decide a game. The suns game was just horrible, Amare wasnt a manchild, he was a freaking 7 year old girl... he was falling on purpose, cuz he couldnt guard dwight.. i hope this rule goes into effect.
Flopping gets a lot of hate (justified to a certain extent), but the same thing happens on the offensive side and nobody seems to pay attention to it. Guards regularly jump into their defenders and throw up a shot afterwards or players exaggerate their missed shot to convince the refs that they were touched, and that's just as frustrating to watch IMO. Getting rid of one thing will only make the other one more noticeable.
