I am as appalled as anyone about the officiating in the NBA finals this year. I'm an avid basketball and I have always been one that watches or stays for every minute of every game even if my team is losing. But I had to turn most of the games off in this series. I have seen many bad calls, phantom fouls, non-calls over the years but this was ridiculous. And I am not denying that Dallas may have won if they would have shut their eyes and blindly bulled their way to the rim in an effort to exploit the same system, but I didn't expect them to. This is a coach that played in San Antonio for a coach who would pull a player if he thought they were trying to flop for calls.
The solution is to move to a new system. The current system is much the way the rest of America has begun to work and the reason why much stuff is hosed. Americans are afraid to award people for merit or productivity in fear of hurting the feelings of those who don't do as good or as much work. The NBA awards refs for seniority and just for being on the team even if their performance slips.
So here is my proposal:
Refs should be broken into teams of six. The league should have a lot of say as to who is on these teams, but the refs should have input. Most importantly they should be able to work with their friends; the refs that they themselves get along best with. This won't always be possible and sometimes the league will just have to force a group to work together, but familiarity will breed at least respect.
These same six refs should always work together on a rotating schedule. I picked six because if there is a full slate of games, to groups of three could work games nearby. These teams could be regional, but that is not mandatory.
The purpose of this is for the refs to be comfortable not only on the court in front of the fans but also with each other. I would love, one time, to see a ref call a foul on a basket and award the free throw and have another ref come over and say "Man, you totally blew that one. I saw it, and it was not a foul." Then have them confer with the third official and have the fould waved off and the ball awarded out of bounds. I know refs are concerned about losing face, but i'd have much more respect for a ref that recognizes his mistake and fixes it than for a ref that was so arrogant as to believe that he should never have to reverse a call.
The second big benefit is consistency in the way the games are called. The same group of refs will likely call all the games they officiate similarly. There may be variation between these six man teams, but at least you would know "when I have team A, they will call charges and not allow moving screens" and "when I have team B, they will let a little more go on the outside but will call it close in the trenches." This is acceptable. Major league pitchers scout the strike zones of different Umps and adjust accordingly, NBA players and coaches can too.
For the Playoffs, in the first round the best 8 groups officiate a series each. In the second the best 4, and so on. Each year the teams are evaluated by the league office and by annonymous input from within the team and are reshuffled as necessary.
I know this plan is not full-proof. I don't even know the full number of NBA officials and how many six man teams you'd need to run a league for a season. But, theoretically the number of guys on the team could vary from as few as 4 to as many as 10, maybe 12. The important thing is to keep the groups as small as possible to reduce variability within the group. I might also refrain from designating a lead official, or distributing the senior members of the current staff evenly. The point is to not have one official with the power to assert his will on a game or a group and the rest of the officials need to feel comfortable in confronting him about a bad call. That is less likely to happen if you let a veteran official take a rookie under his wing. If you put all the vets and all the rooks on a separate team then maybe the vets will call a better game and get to work the playoffs the first few seasons, but the rooks will mature and learn together, become a cohessive unit and, hopefully, improve from year to year. Seniority and experience should be rewarded if it leads to better results, not just because someone has it.
