Want some bad news? Dirk Nowitzki believes the NBA will never get rid of flopping. Worse yet, the German, accused from time to time for flopping himself, told The Dallas Morning News that he actually thinks flopping has a part to play, that doing whatever you can to get a call is all a part of the game. Normally, we’d agree. Do whatever you can to win. That includes working yourself to exhaustion in the offseason, getting into practice fights to up the intensity, being unafraid of the moment, and just about everything else that separates the good players from the great ones. But we’ll never condone flopping.
In an ESPN Dallas story, Dirk said:
“We’re never going to get rid of it,” Nowitzki said recently, according to The Dallas Morning News. “But you got to limit it. It’s part of sports. It’s part of winning. Some people are smart and do a little extra thing to kind of sell the call. To me, that’s part of sports.”
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“You don’t want the obvious ones, the really, really bad one,” Nowitzki said, according to the Dallas newspaper. “I think we’d love to get rid of those.
“But if somebody really does get shoved or hit a little bit, just to sell it a little for the referees so it does get the call, I don’t have a problem with that. I think that’s part of the game.”
Nowitzki is right. In a sport that relies so much on touch, a precise shooting motion, and infrequent intense contact, it’s stupid to expect refs to ignore players trying to sell a call. Even without the theatrics, the smallest physical contact could often result in fouls. But something needs to be done about this. And this. And ESPECIALLY this. It’s honestly getting hard to watch.
We once did a piece on the 20 worst flops in NBA history and had to pour through about two decades of evidence. But now? It’s such an epidemic that you could put a list together just from 2013 NBA Playoff footage.
What do you think they should do about flopping?
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