Hack Your Eyes

In tonight's Game 3 of Spurs-Suns, San Antonio continued their tactic from the first two games, where they deliberately fouled Shaquille O'Neal at the end of the quarter, to gain additional possessions. This led to a debate between analysts Mark Jackson and Jeff van Gundy, where Jackson opined that the rules shouldn't be changed to protect a bad free throw shooter, and Jackson wondering why the Spurs just didn't do this for the entire game.

Both men, of course, are missing four critical points:

1) It's terrible to watch. Basketball is a spectator sport that needs to attract casual fans. One team benefiting from what seems like, not to put too fine a point on it, cheating... is bad television. Along with the inherent bad visuals of Shaq doing this, and the game getting all herky-jerky sloppy.

2) If it's not acceptable in the last two minutes of the game, it shouldn't be acceptable in the first 46 minutes, either. This is like not having a DH until the 9th inning -- illogical on its face.

3) Eventually, one of the intentionally fouled players is going to, um, not like it very much.

If I were Shaq, especially in a game that didn't mean much, I'd do something when a player intentionally fouled me. I'd make him, you know, earn it. Perhaps even send a message to the next coach or player who gets sent out to do the deed. And just that quickly, the tactic gets a heck of a lot less enjoyable.

4) Fourth and finally, we don't really want to watch guys hugging each other. It's kinda, you know, not really high on our sports fan priority list.

My guess is that the Association changes this in the off-season, because they are usually pretty good about making the product more watchable... and there's more than a few pretty horrible free throw shooters in the league, and the trend has been for that to get more common, not less. If you don't like Hack A Shaq, you also won't like Hack Duncan, Hack Wallace, Hack Howard, Hack Chandler, Hack Maxiell...