ESPN's Truehoop has had a strong few weeks. They've been rolling out an excellent ad-hoc series based around rule improvements and other game enhancements to the game of basketball that could make things better for the players and the fans, titled HoopIdea. Today, Adam will share his own idea to make the game better: ending the beneficial foul.

A series of good passes leaves a player wide open for a three. He catches the ball, rises, and hits the shot. But before that can happen, the refs blow the whistle, and the ref gives his team the ball out-of-bounds. You see, a reach-in foul on the floor a second earlier had stopped the play. It hadn't stop the passer, it hadn't stopped the play, but it was a foul nonetheless. Sometimes the fouled team gets an extra free throw, but usually this kind of foul ends with a side-out and nothing else.

Later, in the same game, a big man catches the ball near the rim. He goes up, only to be pummeled. The player sighs loudly going to the free throw line. After all, he hates shooting free throws. And as two shots clank off the rim, the opposing coach applauds his player, while the announcers swoon about how good a foul that was. The fouled team loses the game by two points, two points that they could've spared had their big man not been forced to shoot pressure free throws. Do you know any other sport where breaking the rules, committing a foul actually benefits a team? Where a foul is a strategic device rather than a mistake with grave consequences? I don't. I propose that basketball shouldn't be such a sport either. What's more, the changes couldn't be easier to make.

Let's sketch out the two major situations, and how I'd tweak the rules.

• • •

Late-game fouling: The most egregious example of beneficial fouls. You see it in almost every close game. A team is losing, the opposition has the ball, the clock is running out. Instead of taking the loss, the other team fouls, allowing it to get the ball back. The other team may even hit both free throws, but a lucky three (or a lucky and-one) can bring them right back to the game. And if the winning team misses their free throws? Overtime might be around the corner. Why are we allowing the losing team to benefit from breaking the rules? I've heard people suggest three foul shots for reach-in fouls committed outside the three point line in the bonus and such, but that doesn't change the main issue: Fouls and free throws are suddenly more important than having played 47 minutes and being down 5.

Why not just allow the coach of the fouled team choose what he wants his players to do? Free throws? Fine, go ahead, your choice. An out of bounds play? Sure, and the fouled player should even choose where he wants to take it out of bounds. Would you want to play Hack-a-Dwight, or in fact, foul Dwight on shots at all if it meant the possibility of a out-of-bounds play run from the baseline? These plays are high percentage, and pretty deadly if drawn up right, you know. They don't stop the clock either, which makes the whole concept of the intentional foul as pointless as committing fouls should be.

Reach-ins to stop a sure basket: There are two obvious situations in which this happens: on the fast break (when somebody's barely ahead of the play on defense which saves the open path to the basket), and a reach-in foul that just happens to stop an easy three pointer. There are plays in which players get easy baskets after a foul is committed on the passer. The ball is stopped, the foul might just save 2 points. There are plays where a big man gets an easy putback of a miss caused by a foul. The fouled player might miss some foul shots, shots that he wouldn't have to miss have the refs let the play develop before blowing on the whistle.

Soccer has a neat solution: if a foul is committed and the fouled team keeps the ball moving, the referee usually gives advantage and lets the play flow. In hockey, when a penalty is called, play isn't stopped until the other team gains possession of the puck. But in basketball all we have is a rather loosely defined continuation rule, and nothing else. Why not let the putback happen? Why not let the fast break continue? Why let the opposition benefit from fouling? It's so easy to change the rules so that the ref can swallow his whistle and let the play unfold before he decides to stop it.

These fouls are annoying, break the flow of the game, and don't belong in basketball. It's easy to create rules that don't benefit the felon, and yet (as it stands) the NBA doesn't seem to realize that the game is way more exciting when the players are trying to make plays, instead of fouling everything that moves. How many games have been lost because of Hack-a-Big-Guys? How many points and highlights have been wasted because of off-ball touch fouls? How many times have announcers said "I like that foul"? How many fast break dunks have we missed because of almost-clear-path fouls? The truth it doesn't really matter how many times these things happen, considering the current alternative is a disruption in flow at crucial points in the game, an awkward strategic relic, and a more stilted product. I admit there are strategic end-game situations that would be essentially eliminated and in the beginning the game might flow very differently at times. But I'd argue that it's worth it to create a more entertaining, more compelling sport.

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Let’s face it, the All-Star game has never been particularly enjoyable. Hell, my dad has always thought of it as a solid representation of how he felt about basketball. And he would say so:

“3 and a half quarters of boring back and forth action, and sometimes an intense last 6 minutes,” he'd say, quickly adding that he enjoyed playing the sport. He just hated watching it. He loves hockey, but he's not a one-sport guy: he loves watching the NFL and CFL. As an extra dish to his beloved hockey, that is.

Let's talk about hockey. It’s not surprising that my dad, a guy who went through his 20s watching Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers in Edmonton, (while playing the sport whenever he had free time) had plenty of pretty good reasons to watch it. And yet, hockey - usually a relatively more exciting and unpredictable game - at one point managed to have an even less passionate All-Star Game than the NBA's. The whole experience of watching the NHL All-Star Game was tantamount to watching the lockout leagues — soulless, careless, pointless.

So, the NHL realized something that we'd all known pretty damn well — it’s all about the Weekend. On its face the All-Star Weekend is no great innovation: the NBA has its All-Star Weekend, with all the excitement that comes with jumping over Korean cars, Charles Barkley choosing Allen Iverson with the 1st pick in an All-time Fantasy Draft. And yet, in recent years, the NBA has lost the All-Star battle to the NHL. How did that happen?

It’s simple, really. The NHL made everyone have fun. I mean, I bet Dwight had fun when playing point guard, but I’m not sure the guys on the bench were particularly happy about wasting their time like that. Sure, they played 10 minutes in the All-Star Game's version of Ultimate Scrubtime™, but that's probably not as fun as taking a rest from a grueling schedule, lockout or no lockout. Of course, opting out would be at least an faux pas, if not a spit in the face of the blue-white-red Jerry West silhouette.

We can do so much better. I know this for a fact: I’m writing this right after a fun packed NHL All-Star Weekend. With the rather disgraceful exception of Alex Ovechkin, the NHL's elites put some magic into the All-Star Game. Brendan Shanahan - the man behind the new format, NHL whipmaster general and former player - knew exactly what buttons to push to get people into the fun: Make it a bit more personal, affect their ego, and make everything a fight.

It all starts with the fantasy draft. Players choose players, ending the artificial East-West fight in one stroke and giving the fans answers to all sorts of competitively interesting questions. Questions like: “What if the Sedin Twins played separately?" They got their answer. Some of the players received confirmation of their greatness and others ended up getting picked last: It's hard to argue with the unblinking honesty, and it's even harder not to respond. Consider Phil Kessel, who after being left alone, like the last kid to be picked in gym class (and believe me, I know that feeling), he was mocked, forced down the throat of one of the team captains, all while Alex Oveckhin took pictures of Kessel’s walk of shame while showcasing his beautiful, nearly toothless grin. Kessel came back with a career year. Yeah, it's over-the-top to imagine LeBron taking photos of a lonely Joe Johnson last year. But wouldn't the hierarchy the draft brings to the table give the game a rougher edge right from the start? Wouldn't that kill the "no defense" dunk-fest first quarters in their tracks?

The innovations wasn’t limited to the game itself: The Skills competition all counted as one goal in the game, and only the All-Stars (and rookies assigned to both teams by the league at random) could participate in the competitions. Without the tacked-on gravitas of "home-field advantage in the World Series" or the channel-changing "random HORSE events that go nowhere," the Weekend all seemed more connected, and it all felt like it mattered competitively. The whole Weekend was a great tribute to hockey’s team game nature, something that the NBA fails to promote regularly with basketball*, electing to focus on the stars.

*No, those idiotic BBVA "if his teammate didn't get those rebounds, he wouldn't be the best passer" they play constantly on League Pass broadcasts don't count.

I’m not saying that David Stern should follow his former protege Gary Bettman exactly. That would be damn near impossible to do. But Stern should learn a lesson from hockey: These All-Star Games need storylines to work, and Blake Griffin jumping over a friggin KIA just won’t do.

Wouldn’t you love to see 2-on-2 or 1-on-1 games? Or a new skills challenge format? Or a fantasy draft*? And finally, wouldn’t you like to see a Dunk Contest exclusively between All-Star players, as chosen by their captains? Would LeBron have an excuse to run away to this time? Oh, the dunks wouldn’t be as meticulously prepared if the players were only informed about the contest a day or two beforehand, but, on the other hand it would probably make the contest come back to its spontaneous roots. No more props, no more jumping over people. Just raw, beautiful dunkage.

*This would also allow the NBA to avoid the embarrassing “We’re out of people we could put in here...” situation that's always a threat with the East back-ups.

Come on, we all dislike most of these events as they are, and you can sense that the players don't want to be there: Tell me that a few of the usually disinterested players wouldn't enjoy some of these changes. Wouldn't Kobe sure get excited about facing LeBron or Paul Pierce in a deadly one-on-one battle, with a Westrose/Rosebrook twins (And I’m referencing their abilities here) battle on deck? Teammates battling against each other publicly? Wouldn't that be great? I’m sure the players would get a kick out of it, and we'd feel the tension and enjoyment back home, too. We're basketball fans and these are the situations we live for as fans.

The NBA usually seems to get it. But on one of their marquee events they waste the opportunity and the NHL totally laps them. It's time the NBA based its All-Star Game and Weekend on the bit of wisdom that has helped basketball grow in the past and that makes it great today:

Storylines make sports.

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In a two part series, Adam and Aaron are going to examine two aspects of Kevin Love's 2-game suspension following the inglorious footwork he employed against Houston Rockets forward Luis Scola last Saturday. For today's half, we'll examine the hypocrisy of the NBA's incessant emphasis on "respect for the game" when a player mouths off to the refs that becomes curiously absent when the livelihood of a player comes to call.

When the NBA assesses technical fouls, how often does it cite "respect of the game?" Remember all of Dwight Howard's technicals last year? When asked to explain the one game suspension Dwight received for angrily chucking the ball at the refs, all we could hear echoing from the office of the Commissioner was “respect." Me, personally, I never really understood what agreeing with every call the refs make has to do with respecting the game. The refs are the authority, but even the best authority makes mistakes. The NBA's response to players trying to express their unhappiness in an emotionally charged moment is basically akin to the “Say what again!” scene in Pulp Fiction.

Nobody can forget the epic Sheed techs for virtually nothing, everyone's seen the infamous Duncan technicals, and we’ve all seen an aggravated Dwight have to leave the game early because he’s had it with the zebras. And I don’t think a single person among us knew what this all had to do with respect. And now the NBA has lost another part of it’s credibility, demonstrating how respect for another player has nothing to do with their particular definition of "respect." Personally? I'm a bit disgusted.

• • •

Kevin Love has been suspended for 2 games for what I would describe as one of two things. Either an outrageously bush league stomp on Luis Scola’s face, or — if Love’s “accidental” version is the case — a careless, dangerous play that should be seeded out of this league for the same reason calling foul on a ref warrants a technical, in Stern's eyes. Respecting the league. Respecting the other player’s career, respecting his health, and respecting his life. Love did not just push his leg off of Scola gently, he kicked back with a lot of strength, causing Scola’s head to fall back, hit the court, and bounce. He also made big time contact with his chest, as though the face stomp wasn't enough. Scola may not have been hurt, and as he played 36 minutes that night (many after the offending incident), he probably wasn't. But this could’ve been a concussion, a broken nose, a broken jaw, if Scola’s not lucky even a broken rib. All because of one careless play.

I’d like to believe Kevin Love didn’t do it on purpose, I really would. He’s a nice guy who doesn’t bear much resemblance to the bush league virtuoso I initially wanted to compare him to -- Andrew Bynum -- in terms of how he plays in a general sense, or how reckless he is on the court. And yet, that play seemed everything but unintentional. Love must’ve known Scola was under him. I mean, you feel things like that, it’s not hard to notice that there’s a 6’9” guy lying on the floor under you. And then, when you first make contact with his body, in this case his head, why would you follow through with your step after looking down? Why would you strengthen it? Why not just take the fall forward, a la ninja Blake Griffin and James Posey. I just don’t see any excuse for Love to do what he has done, and yet his suspension is 2 games. Robin Lopez got 1 game for brushing with an official earlier this season, and given he was also ejected from the game where the incident occured, I’d say that he served just as much time as Love will. Now, why the hell would a little brush be worth as much as a stomp?

Perhaps what I’m getting at here is that the NBA needs a reformed thinking about penalizing players. A little brush, a few spur-of-the-moment shouts don’t hurt anyone. Stomping on someones face does. I don’t care if it was intentional, and to an extent neither should be the NBA. A reckless move is sometimes as bad as an intentional move, and if you enable players to get away with bad plays just because they look unintentional, this league is going in the wrong direction.

Perhaps, the NBA should take inspiration from a league ran by David Stern’s former protege, Gary Bettman. The NHL has realized that reckless plays are as bad as intentional plays, and launched a new platform to explain to the players and fans the cause for suspension through a video narrated by NHL Vice-President (and former player) Brendan Shanahan, or his deputy (and former player) Rob Blake. Personally, I’d like to know how the Love suspension wasn’t worth 3 games. Yes, I know it’s a one game difference, but the NBA should draw a line, a bare minimum on someone’s carelessness, to be upgraded in case of evident malice.

Times like these are the times when this league shows it’s inexplicably bad judgement, protecting its officials from the most minor and meaningless wrongdoings by the players, all the while not protecting the players from their peers. I can't think of the last time a hockey player was suspended for insulting an official, and believe me, they yap a lot. And they’re not nice about it either. What I did see, however, were players suspended for reckless play early in the season. The suspensions were harsh, unforgiving and well explained. And guess what? There hasn’t been a suspension in 2 weeks now in the NHL. Perhaps it’s time for basketball to realize what their real treasure is. Not the refs, not the people who don’t want to hear “shit” uttered on their TV screen, but players. It's players who make this game great. And it's players who aren’t protected adequately from the recklessness of their peers.

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We'd like all our readers to give a warm welcome to the newest member of our writing staff, Adam Koscielak. You may know his work from his excellent work at Sun-N-Gun. He's an incredibly smart, witty fellow studying law across the pond in Poland. I thought I had things bad -- I went to college in a non-NBA city, and now work in a city two hours from DC and terribly far from every other NBA city of note. Adam, of course, has no sympathy for me -- he's in Poland, roughly 6000 miles away from the closest NBA city. For his introductory piece for the Gothic, we asked him to explain what it's like being a fan of a sport that's so far distant. He blew us away. Without further ado, Adam's excellent introduction.

5:00 AM — I’m prying my eyes open, trying to stay awake. This happens all the time. And if it doesn’t happen, it probably means I woke up a mere few hours earlier. There’s something inherently unnatural about sitting out in the dark, trying to keep quiet not to wake anyone around you up. And yet that’s what I do, night in and night out. I sit at my desk, a game is playing on my 24 inch screen, and ESPN’s Daily Dime Live is flying down on my laptop screen, along with a Twitter feed. An empty beer mug once filled with coffee sits on the table next to my desk. Does it stand or lie or sit? I never know: for all I care it could be flying right now.

The first quarter of the night’s late game is just coming to a close.

• • •

It started with hockey. During the 2010 playoffs, I suddenly realized I could actually watch games online. And so that year I sat there, rooting for the Canadiens (my dad’s second favourite team) to beat the Capitals. The Canadiens pulled an upset off. Then I watched the Penguins and it was the same story. They may have eventually fallen in the Conference Finals to the Flyers, but I kept on watching hockey. I saw Patrick Kane’s overtime cup winning goal, the confusion surrounding it, and the moment in which everyone realized the puck was in the net. Then I started watching hockey in the regular season, and finally I started watching basketball.

But let’s back up.

See, I've always been a basketball fan. Ever since I can remember, I loved playing it, I loved watching people play, and I loved any video games connected with it. The problem is that I was living in Poland, and found uncomfortably that basketball was unable to see anywhere. The timezones made it hard, the fact that the only NBA license in the country was on a paid channel made it hard, and the lack of exposure in the media made it hard. I was limited to watching Youtube videos filled with highlights of various players, reading Wikipedia entries and reading box scores. The closest thing I’ve seen to a full basketball game at that time might’ve been the one in Space Jam. And yet, year by year I'd find teams to root for, players to love and on-paper knowledge of the game. I may not have known what a pick-and-roll was, but I sure as hell knew who won the 2005 MVP award.

The first team I rooted for was the Chicago Bulls, or should I say, "Team Jordan". The only NBA name known widely in Poland at the time was Jordan. Every jersey was a Jordan jersey, and kids like me got their basketball knowledge from NBA Live games and from Space Jam. I remember having a Jordan jersey and a Bulls photo album commemorating one of their championship runs. That album made me think that Luc Longley was a very good player. Yep, Luc Longley. He was big, and had pictures of him dunking. It made total sense, I swear. I can also proudly note that even though I was a child, I just knew that there was something inherently wrong with Dennis Rodman’s sanity (if he ever had any of it, that is).

But as fast as the Jordan era came, it went away. Jordan retired, making way for guys like Shaq. Shaq was probably the only basketball name widely known in Poland for a long time. You wouldn’t hear about Tim Duncan, Patrick Ewing or Reggie Miller. Hell, even the swagger of Allen Iverson wasn’t really known. Just as hockey knowledge ended with Wayne Gretzky, basketball knowledge ended with Michael Jordan, with a little Shaq for good measure. And yet, I knew a few more names besides those two. I knew a team other than the Lakers and the Bulls. An illustrious crew, to be sure.

That's right. I knew the Minnesota Timberwolves.

• • •

See, one time my dad had come back from a business trip to Minny with a nice present: a Kevin Garnett jersey. At the time, I would choose my sports allegiances solely by my favourite jersey colours. The colours? Blue and green. The Minny jerseys at the time? That’s right, blue and green. The Garnett jersey was blue and green. Everything fit perfectly, so naturally I became a T-Wolves fan. Now, I don’t remember most of the names of back then. I mean, I know that guys like Sam Cassell played with them, but I just don’t recall knowing that. Honestly, I only remember two: Kevin Garnett and Wally Szczerbiak. I absolutely loved both of them. KG, because I had the jersey (of course) and because he could dunk the ball in NBA Live. Szczerbiak, because he had a Polish surname and was able to nail the three almost every time in that same game. This fandom remained until I got hold of the internet.

The first broadband connection I ever had came when I was 12 or so. I was a big geek back then (hell, I still am), and I got hold of it pretty quickly. Back then Youtube didn’t exist: It's funny to say, but at that time virtually all movies were formatted for viewing in either Real Player or Quicktime, slowly lagging through a bunch of pixels. Live streaming would’ve been considered a miracle, not a chance.

But there was Wikipedia, and so I had a way to check regularly on the players I’d seen in NBA Live. That's about when I became a Steve Nash fan. After all, as soon as I learned a Canadian - like my dad - was an All-Star, I jumped on the bandwagon. Two years later, I was in the 2-time MVP's bandwagon. Even though I was rooting for the Suns, I hadn't actually watched them. At least not until I'd found a weird motivation.

See, as with Nash, I'd been observing Marcin Gortat’s career with some interest before he joined the Suns. The only Pole in the NBA always deserves another Pole's attention, I figured. Still, with Gortat getting so few minutes in Orlando, it was hard getting excited about his rebounding rate in limited action. But when I heard Orlando made a trade with my favorite team Phoenix, I decided it might be time to start watching basketball more actively. I watched the Suns get blown out by the Heat in Gortat’s first game, and I watched Steve Nash live for the first time, outside the highlights, outside the montages, just in the flow of the game. I experienced the beauty of Steve Nash’s game firsthand. Ever since that game, I tried to make sure I’d watch every Suns game I could. Whenever school was starting late, I’d stay up and watch pixelated Steve pass to pixelated Marcin on a pixelated pick-and-roll. Slowly, I started getting involved in other facets of the game, ESPN’s Daily Dime Live, Twitter. I dove in, and emerged a blogger. I don’t know how it happened. It was probably Andrew Lynch’s inherent niceness and recommendation that brought me to Sun-n-Gun (I was blogging independently before that) but whatever the case, at some point I wasn’t a basketball fan anymore: I was a basketball maniac, up all night. And not even for games, for lockout news, because I wanted, no, needed basketball to come back. I don’t think many people in Poland did.

• • •

Most people out here still don’t know a lot of basketball. Don’t try to ask them about anyone aside from Kobe, LeBron, Marcin and Steve, they won’t have an idea. Tim Duncan? No. Manu Ginobili? “Is he a soccer player?” people’ll ask. This is perhaps the most awkward part of being a basketball fan in Poland. The hours are survivable, the distance between me and my team isn’t a problem with a League Pass subscription. But the weird looks you get from people when you tell them you’re a basketball blogger, when you sift through box scores on your laptop between classes. I can't even get past the first line of their defense, let alone tell them about an entire post of weird, unfamiliar names.

I’ve done a lot of nerdy things in my life, but I've never felt like a bigger nerd than I do right now. I end up as a bit of a closeted NBA guy. I don’t tell many people about it, I think around ten of the people I know in real life actually know what I do aside from studying law. It's sad to say, but here sports fandom makes you seem rather dumb. It's not surprising, considering how most sports fans in Poland are destructive soccer hoolies. And people here have yet to find an ambitious way - a different approach - to talking about sports. Here every story is a recap or a report, a boring approach lacking the fascination and passion that bloggers bring to the table. Almost nobody tries reading between the lines or appreciating the hidden beauty. They opt for a black-and-white view of a colourful world. As a result, nobody treats sportswriters seriously or thinks they can be serious. The subject matter seems too simple. No, ambition is reserved for film critics and literary journalists. In the end, everything seems to come down to a simple equation: “If you write about smart things, you’re smart. If you write about stupid things, you’re stupid.”

Yes, it’s a silly mindset, and it should change, as the writing evolves. But until that day comes, I won’t be waving around my “sports blogger” flag. It would take me too much time to explain everything, to go past the surface, and it's not worth the effort. And I don’t really mind: I managed to hide my Star Trek obsession without a hitch, and this should be easy. I don't mind, but on the other hand I’m the odd man out, a man displaced in time and space. I feel like half of my life is somewhere in Phoenix - in a media box behind the scorer's table in the US Airways Center - and the other half is in Warsaw. He's studying law and doing the things that young people usually do. He's the Bruce Wayne to my Batman.

• • •

6:30 AM — I lay the finishing touches on my piece as the game’s third quarter comes to a close. And as I feel the night coming to an end, I don’t mind. I don’t mind being tired, I don’t mind going to sleep at sunrise. After all, for the time zone switching, the weird sleeping patterns and the tiptoeing, I’m having fun, just because I’m watching basketball. I joyfully take in every jumpshot, every dunk, every pick and roll. And I wonder: How the hell did I go from a box score pruning jersey-based fan to a live-watching insomniac blogger?

I don’t think I’ll ever know.

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