The NBA’s Board of Governors passed a pair of rule changes on Tuesday designed to address flopping and the number of challenges that a coach can use. After it was previously announced that the league would put the rule changes in front of the Board last month, the decision was made to adopt an in-game flopping penalty for the next year, while coaches will receive a second challenge in the event their first one is successful.
While the league will keep the fines that have been in place for players who greatly embellish calls, the new rules will add a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul call that goes against the offending player’s team. This would allow the opposing team to shoot a free throw, although there would not be an automatic change in possession. Additionally, while flopping violations aren’t able to be addressed by a coach’s challenge, the referees can add it if they notice a flop while reviewing a different play, and can wait until there’s a stop within the game to make a call instead of immediately interrupting a play.
As for the additional coach’s challenge, the league had to slightly change how timeouts are addressed within the new rule. Currently, if a team wins its only challenge, it gets to keep the timeout that it called to trigger a review. While that will remain the case going forward, the team will lose its timeout no matter the outcome of a second challenge.
