No More Hacking Part 1: Establishing the Imperative
On June 5th 2015, I received some very disappointing news from the internet. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver went on record saying there’s “little chance” that ‘Hack-a-Shaq’ will be “banned” in this coming off-season. Silver argued:
“The data shows that we're largely talking about two teams, throughout the playoffs. In fact, 90 percent of the occurrences of Hack-a-Shaq involve the Rockets and the Clippers, and for the most part, it's two players. Seventy-five percent involve two players, DeAndre Jordan and Dwight Howard. So then the question becomes, should we be making that rule change largely for two teams and two players?"
Unbelievably, just over a month prior to this statement, similar reports were coming out suggesting there was an “85% chance” of the rule getting changed.
Where did things go wrong? How did the tenor of the discussion swing so wildly from a likely change to a consensus dismissal?
Perhaps Adam Silver and the NBA ownership group are listening to the wrong people here. Ex-players and league owners argue from a competitor’s stance and seem to have full ownership of the current dialogue inside the league. “You’ve got to make your free throws” they say. “If my team isn’t negatively affected by the tactic, why should I make a change that may actually improve the fortunes of clubs that are?”
One might argue instead that such a rule change would be made largely for the millions of fans who pay money to enjoy the NBA as a commercial product, rather than for “two players,” a statement that not only misses the point, but is also quite obviously false.
As I pointed out in my very first post, rule changes happen in sports all the time. Sometimes these changes can even be fairly radical; one of the sad ironies surrounding the Hack-a-Shaq controversy is that most of the proposed rules changes would be, in fact, quite minimal.
While I could easily write volumes attempting to deconstruct public statements and provide counterpoints to the arguments provided by Silver and others, I’ve been itching to make my own case in favor of rule changes. I’m guessing you already know this, judging from the name of the blog.
But before I get started, why not kick things off with a statement made by one of the NBAs pre-eminent minds on the topic?
"I hate it. I think it's awful. I hate doing it. Seriously. I think it's a pain in the neck, fans don't like it, I don't like it, nobody likes it. It disrupts the flow of the game. If there's an equitable way to get rid of it, I'm all for it.”
Even Gregg Popovich wants to get rid of it, if there’s an “equitable way.” The good news is that there are actually many options available. But before I discuss all that in Part 2, I think it’s important to try and establish an imperative for change.
In other words, it’s important to be clear about WHY a change is both desireable and necessary. If we can win that argument, that opens up many possibilities for HOW to best change the game for the better.
Exploits in Video Games
First, I want to use an example from the world of video games to help us clearly identify Hack-a-Shaq for what it truly is: an undesireable tactical loophole or exploit.
In game development, we architect systems of rules for the purpose of serving a design. Often-times, these systems are complex and varied and deeply interconnected, and their interactions with one another can often be difficult to fully predict. Take any popular video game, and odds are good that some highly dedicated player has hammered on the rules of that game until they have bent or broken.
Sometimes, the discoveries of a player testing the boundaries of a game are simply considered to be bugs, or defects in the software. Someone imagined a design for the game, but the implementation was faulty, or perhaps failed to account for some complex or unpredictable set of interactions.
Bugs are not necessarily a big deal. Every video game ever created has them. As a developer, I know that it is typically the case that games ship with *many* known bugs still present. This is because many bugs are actually unimportant, or don’t greatly affect the experience we intend for the player to have, and because, let’s face it, fixing every single bug in a piece of software is usually very cost prohibitive.
But sometimes, we screw up and ship bugs that are more serious. One interesting class of serious bug is the exploit or loophole. When an exploit has been discovered, the result is that players look to take advantage of strategies that subvert the intent of the design. We call these degenerate strategies to indicate that there is a strategy which is commonly preferred but cuts against the designer’s purpose.
To be clear, not all unexpected outcomes are undesireable; sometimes players discover strategies that are beautiful or interesting, that actually add value to the designed systems. But when they ARE undesireable, because they create inequitable situations, or disrupt a delicate game balance, or disrupt the aesthetic appeal of the game, we will often look to update the game software.
In other words, we look to patch the exploit.
I wanted to find an actual concrete example from the internet, so I went googling for “exploits in video games.” As it turns out, there are many articles on the topic, since exploits in digital games often have the quality of folklore. Since they were unintended, they often exist for a brief period in time, before the developers are able to eliminate it from their game.
Battlefield 3 is a team-based competitive networked multiplayer shooter that came out way back in 2011. In Battlefield, players choose classes of warriors (such as “Engineer,” “Support,” “Recon,” or “Medic”) and work together to defeat a team of enemy players on a field of battle (Battle-Field, get it?).
Battlefield 3 featured a notion of “Rank,” which was akin to “Level” in a role playing game. As you played the game and earned experience points through play, you would be rewarded by ascending the Rank system, which would unlock new capabilities for your player.
Like many competitive online games, BF3 featured a broad audience of players looking for competitive advantages to employ. And since the rules of the game were varied and complex, they eventually discovered some unexpected and undesireable loopholes. For example:
“Players discovered that they could gain an absurd amount of experience in every multiplayer match by having friendly engineers shoot their own EOD bots. The player would then repair the bots; the engineers would keep shooting. Next match? Switch. End result? Massive leveling up for everyone.”
Battlefield is intended to be a game of war. Players taking advantage of this exploit, in my estimation, were no longer “playing Battlefield.” They had identified a loophole and were performing rote actions that have nothing to do with the game’s fantasy in order to gain a competitive advantage over other players. You could call this set of actions “cheating” and you wouldn’t be far off the mark -- but what’s interesting to me is that this set of actions was merely the emergent consequence of otherwise well-intentioned systems working in concert to produce an unwanted result.
On the one hand, you had “engineers” who had the capacity to construct this particular game object (the “EOD Bot”), and on the other you had a system that existed to reward players for destroying these objects. Without the proper set of exceptions in place to govern this particular edge case, the ground became fertile for exploitation.
As a result, the designers of the game eventually patched the exploit out of the game. That’s what we do when systems behave in a way that subverts the design intent; we look to modify the rule set so that the game no longer supports these degenerate strategies.
Et Tu, Hack-a-Shaq?
This brings us -- at long last -- to the NBA, one of the greatest sports leagues in the world! A fabulously entertaining team sport played by some of the most skilled athletes in the world.
Basketball’s beauty comes in large part from the players and the ball moving in concert, groups of talented athletes with varied skill sets attempting to score on another group of gifted players dedicated to stopping them, all in real time, with a clock ticking down on every possession. From relatively simple rules and actions there emerges a vastly beautiful and complex sport, one that is dynamic and breathtaking and dramatic when it is at its very best.
And then there’s crap like this:
For the uninitiated, I’m going to take a minute to back all the way up and try and explain what “Hack-a-Shaq” is, as clearly as possible.
In the NBA, when a player is fouled in the act of shooting, they are rewarded with two shots from the free throw line (or one shot if they happen to make the original shot in spite of the foul). At the start of play, fouls that are committed on players who are NOT shooting, or on players who are away from the ball -- do not result in the fouled team taking free throws. Instead, the fouled team takes the ball in from out of bounds, and the shot clock is reset.
In an effort to discourage excessive fouling, the fifth team foul in a quarter (or the second within the final two minutes) results in the fouling team entering a state called the penalty. Starting with this fifth team foul, subsequent fouls -- whether committed on a shooter or another player 80 feet away from the ball -- result in bonus free throws being assigned to the fouled player.
At some dark moment in basketball history, someone realized that the opposing team had a player on the court who was relatively poor at shooting free throws at the exact moment in time that their own team was “in the penalty.” This poor free throw shooter doesn’t even have to touch the ball, he can be fouled AWAY from the ball, and suddenly play will be stopped and this player will go to the line, where hopefully he will miss his free throws.
That’s Hack-a-Shaq. Named after the Hall-of-Famer Shaquille O’Neal, but sadly not limited to use on players named “Shaq.” Throughout his illustrious career, Shaq spent a lot of time in big games at the free throw line due to the implementation of this tactical maneuver by desperate opposing teams (who, for the record, usually lost).
But where does the tactic come from? It’s not explicitly defined by the rules. There is no chapter in the NBA rule-book that defines “Hack-a-Shaq” as a move you can make!
Instead, it is yet another emergent consequence, something that has arisen from multiple systems interacting in an unexpected fashion:
1. The penalty system, designed to discourage fouling and/or reward teams that are good at drawing fouls.
2. Free throw shooting is an act performed by humans of variable skill. It is designed to be a challenge for a player; rather than simply assigning points automatically to penalize a team for ill behavior, we lean on a player skill that is fundamentally related to one of the primary skills employed during play: shooting.
Individually, these two systems make perfect sense in the greater context of the game of basketball.
But if you examine them closely, you can easily spot the loophole that comes from the two systems’ interacting with one another. If you take the penalty system and apply it to really bad free throw shooters, suddenly there is a tool by which a coach can take a gamble that the player fouled might score less points than the opposing team would in the run of play. Additionally, pace is slowed to almost nothing, giving coaches and teams more time to plan strategically and also returning the ball to the fouling team with less time coming off the game clock. To quote Popovich again, “it’s awful… nobody likes it.”
How this plays out in the reality of an actual NBA game has nothing to do with actual basketball, a player will run up to the poor free throw shooter on the opposing team and start flailing at them for no reason other than to stop play and force them to shoot free throws.
I am not being hyperbolic. There is literally no basketball in this play:
To me, this is the crux of the problem. Intentional fouls are given outside the run of play to exploit a tactical loophole. If we’re OK with this being in the game at all, why even make the fouler “commit a foul”? Shouldn’t it be sufficient to yell “I FOUL THEE” or perhaps pull a red card from your basketball trunks, rather than have a player start wailing away on another player’s jersey? As a friend pointed out to me recently, there’s a reason they call it a “foul” and not an “I GOTCHA!”
I saw an interesting quote from David Blatt, coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, on the topic. He mentioned that overseas, under FIBA rules:
“it’s considered an unsportsmanlike (action). You can’t foul a guy with no relation to the game whatsoever. And the referees are educated enough to understand when it’s a basketball play and when you’re grabbing a guy at the other end of the court who’s not involved in the play so as to put somebody purposely on the line.”
Thinking about the idea of sportsmanship, this strikes a big chord with me. Why is intentional fouling of any kind regarded as acceptable? In other cases -- particularly on-ball fouls that are considered excessive or dangerous -- intentional fouling is treated as a technical or flagrant foul and carries a punitive weight associated with bad sportsmanship or dangerous play.
“But you can’t get rid of free throws! And what about the children???”
One of the most common (and to me, deeply strange) arguments against eliminating this tactical loophole is that it will send the wrong message to future generations, that somehow the free throw will become devalued, that the kids will simultaneously stop eating their broccoli and practicing their free throws.
Few would put free throw shooting at the very top of their list of “what is most beautiful about basketball” but it is a fundamental part of the game that does lead to interesting and dramatic consequences. Consider the following two situations:
Example #1. Game 1 of the 2015 NBA Finals -- just the other night -- LeBron James held the ball late in the shot-clock, drawing multiple defenders to his location. Instead of shooting, he dished the ball over to big man Timofey Mozgov, who was diving towards the bakset. Mozgov caught the ball and went up for a slam… only to be fouled in the act by Andrew Bogut.
As a result of Bogut’s play, Mozgov’s seemingly guaranteed 2 points became suddenly not-guaranteed. Mozgov would have to “earn it at the line.” Mozgov is a pretty good free throw shooter (particularly for a 7-footer) and went to the line and calmly sank two highly clutch shots. It was dramatic, and it happened in the run of play.
Example #2. Gregg Popovich inserts barely used scrub Aron Baynes into a game specifically to give fouls on DeAndre Jordan in the 3rd Quarter of a game the Spurs lead over the Clippers by 5. A game that was otherwise exciting and featured the most skilled players on both teams playing hard, intense basketball to try and defeat one another is suddenly sapped of all its pace when Aron Baynes decides to start humping DeAndre Jordan every time the Clippers receive the basketball. Popovich’s hope is that he will disrupt the Clippers’ rhythm and give his own team more possessions and chances to score.
In an ironic turn of events, the tactic backfired -- as it often does. But this blog isn’t really interested in tactical analysis; instead I’m interested in the ensuing eye-rolls and groans that emerge from a crowd when a beautiful game of basketball is reduced to a free throw shooting contest by a ridiculous and undesireable tactic.
For those who wring their hands and worry about future generations deciding they no longer need to practice their free throws if Hack-a-Shaq is legislated out of the NBA, please point them at example #1. The key difference is that the play involves teams and also, strangely enough, an actual basketball. Shouldn’t we all want more of that?
Before this blog post turns into a dissertation, allow me to try and concisely recap my key arguments:
‘Hack-a-Shaq’ is an undesireable tactical exploit, emerging from otherwise well-intentioned core rules of the game.
‘Hack-a-Shaq’ is aesthetically damaging to the sport, as it takes place completely outside basketball’s typical run of play and disrupts the natural rhythm and flow of the game.
Fouls exist to create disincentive for certain on-court behaviors; ‘Hack-a-Shaq’ promotes intentional fouling, which is fundamentally unsportsmanlike.
The tactic has been employed for decades. Enough is enough; it’s time to make a change.
In my mind, we possess sufficient imperative to do so. For the good of the sport, and for the benefit of the people watching, let’s legislate the maneuver out of the game. Let’s patch the exploit.
As I’ll demonstrate in Part 2, there are many interesting options for how to approach that side of the problem. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it written before the start of the 2015-16 NBA season!