NBA Considering Postgame Punishment for Flopping Players

NBA commissioner David Stern’s crusade against the disease that is flopping is beginning to take shape, and has him suggesting retroactive penalties on players who get away with flops. Per the AP: “The NBA commissioner believes too many players are deceiving referees into calling fouls by falling down, or flopping. So he and the league’s newly reformed competition committee met Monday for a discussion about how it can be prevented. One option, Stern said, is a ‘postgame analysis’ in which a player could be penalized if it was determined he flopped. The league retroactively upgrades or downgrades flagrant fouls after review, and along those lines he said that perhaps a player could receive a message from New York saying: ‘Greetings from the league office. You have been assigned flopper status.’ ‘No, I’m joking, but something like that,’ Stern said. ‘That sort of lets people know that it’s not enough to say `it’s all part of the game.’ […] Any rules changes they recommend would have to be approved by the league’s Board of Governors, set for its next meeting in July. Stern hopes by then to have a policy to address flopping, which bothers him because he feels it tricks the referees. He said there’s a ‘broad array of issues’ to look at that can let players know the practice is to be discouraged. ‘If you continue to do this, you may you have to suffer some consequences,’ he said. ‘What those exactly should be and what the progression is is to be decided, because … we just want to put a stake in the ground that says this is not something that we want to be part of our game, without coming down with a sledgehammer but just doing it in a minimalist way to begin stamping it out. And I think there are ways we can do that and we’ll have to wait and see exactly what we come up with.'”