Travelling !

PARIS [The Monday International show] - One of the toughest things to teach to young players is what constitutes travelling or not.

For the last few months, I've been helping my local club improve its coaching with heavy insistance on fondamentals like pivoting,faking,protecting the ball, coming to a clean stop while keeping your options out of the triple-threat position,staying balanced and not leaving your feet unless it's to shoot.

Let me recommend to you some free technical videos I did this summer concerning shooting mechanics and one on one play.

They are in french with some sparse english sub-titles and I was very proud to see the Senegalese basketball federation put them on the front page of their internet site.

Just tap George EDDY Nothing but Net on google or youtube for access.

One interesting technique to help players avoid travelling is to oblige them to make their first dribble below the knee so that the ball leaves their hand quickly before they pick up their pivot foot on a drive.

Remember all the controversy surrounding the olympic final in Bejing because alot of Spanish fans felt the refs let the USA team get away with alot of travelling either to begin the dribble or to end it.

These rules are written the same way in the NBA and Fiba rule books but are not always applied the same way because the NBA seems to give more leeway, in general, then the Fiba refs... except in the fantastic final!

The game ressembled more of an NBA run and gun affair with incredible marksmanship despite active defence by both teams and could in some ways be a model for a closing of the gap in officiating between the two types of worldwide basketball.

Of course the day we all play by the same rules with the same officiating is unfortunately a long way off but anything that brings us all closer together is positive.

In fact that final could also be considered a model for the perfect game of the future since the quality of play and the entertainment value were unique !
The NBA which is logically quicker to alter its rules than Fiba, has just taken a big step towards clarification by officializing that a player can take two steps instead of one at the end of his dribble.

Thanks to this decision, the written rule will join the applied rule because for years the NBA refs have given two steps.

I hardily invite you to see the new NBA video rule book on nba.com which is a great tool for understanding and visualizing different situations and how they are whistled, notably travelling,settting picks and the block or charge rules.

The NBA has made an enormous effort in the last 20 years towards uniformisation of its officiating compared to the pioneer days of the league when each official had his own individual style for making calls.

Obviously this is better for the players who see, generally, the same decisions night in and night out and don't have to adapt as much to individual officials even though human beings are not robots and it is still important to feel out and adapt one's play to the way any one particular game is being called.

The increased athleticism of the NBA players has made refereeing more difficult especially at the end of a dribble where players like Lebron James or Dwayne Wade tend to hop to a jump stop so quickly that you need to see a slow motion replay to realize they took three steps; a sort of hop, skip and a jump!

Another important aspect is that high level basketball is an entertainment industry and noone pays to see to a basketball game hoping to see alot of picky whistles for esoteric applications of complex rules!

A good example is the desire by the NBA and Fiba to limit carrying the ball the last two years.

After many years of laissez-faire in this domain and also the playground and mix tape tours fashion phenomenon, a majority of the players tended to carry the ball!

Trying to go back to the former letter of the rule is tough because we see a rather haphazard and definitely not systematic application which leaves us wondering, why did he decide to apply the rule now and not then!

Finding a happy medium, between purists who don't want to denature the game and marketing people who want high-flying acrobatics and a minimum of whistles in order to fill seats, won't necessarily be easy!

George EDDY