“I can’t talk about Brock Purdy anymore”

As always on Tuesday, my man Jay Williams from JWill, Keyshawn, and Max. I have changed the title of that show. Max is on the show tomorrow, so we will not change the name of the show.

I'll keep it the same. At Real Jay Williams on Twitter. All right, I want to talk hoops. You guys spent all day talking about offensive lines and where Aaron Rodgers is going to go. I can't talk about Brock Purdy one more time.

I can't do it. He's got a baseball injury. We could just talk about baseball and Brock Purdy because he's going to go in for Tommy John surgery.

Although I guess Ben Roethlisberger had that a couple years ago, so it's a football. They're stealing everything. They stole Thursday nights from college football, and now they're stealing baseball injuries as well. And now they're playing overseas in London for multiple games a year. Five?

Well, three in London and three in England and two in Germany now. There you go. It's ridiculous.

All right, let me ask you this question. I was watching. My son is a huge Hoops fan. We're watching the Celtics and the Lakers on Saturday night, and for the life of me, I can't figure out how that was not a foul on LeBron James or against LeBron James. He was going in for a layup.

He does not miss the rim on a layup very often. How do they not call that foul? Does LeBron just not get calls? Well, here's on the call specifically, right?

Obviously, everybody, we have time to review it now. Everybody knows it was a foul. Here's how, as a basketball player, I know it's a foul right off the bat. It's because when you are shooting a layup, the ball always ends up off your fingertips. The ball doesn't pop up off your palm.

The only way the ball pops up off your palm is if your arm is hit. Now you have a ref on the baseline and you have a rep on the sideline. I have no idea how that call is being missed, but here's one of the things that bothers me. I know that LeBron, you know, for the most part has been known via the internet, you know, to complain about different things. And for a guy with his size and his frame, he's going to get hit a lot more and it's not going to be called because he can play through contact. But one of the things that started to bother me about the whole situation, it really ignites a fire for me is that, you know, all I hear every single year as relates to how we cover the NBA is that the regular season isn't exciting.

And how could it be exciting if it's not exciting and meaningful for the players? So here I see LeBron James trending for being, you know, very dramatic or acting like a three-year-old or I hear people online saying, I would even react if my dog were killed that way, things of that sort. And I'm just sitting there saying, well, wow. Okay, well, here's a guy who's 30, 39 years old, who is single-handedly keeping his team in playoff contention, right? Without AD, with Russ, essentially not playing the best version of his foul play, you know, and they're trying to make trades and he's in this historic rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers and every game matters. And we're going to chastise him for actually caring or being passionate because now he didn't get the call and he's being dramatic.

I'm doing that too. When I'm trying to win games each and every single night, and I need to drop 30 to 45 points in order to keep my team in contention. Like maybe we should actually have appreciation for LeBron and just stop finding things online to complain about or to be angry about, because that seems to be the only thing we talk about as it relates to LeBron James. First of all, I could not agree more. We spend way too much time on Twitter.

Do you think the fact, I mean, everybody knows that he got hacked. By the way, maybe it's just my cynicism, but the NBA referees union or whatever, when they released that statement, I thought that was so condescending. They're gutted.

They're not gutted. Well, like, please stop it with the, just, we apologize. We missed the call, right? First of all, they don't have to say anything because the world knows they missed the call. I thought that was, uh, you know, today in BS statement history, um, is, is LeBron a flopper though? Also, I was going to say like, you know, CJ McCollum, and I have all the respect in the world for CJ.

I think he is brilliant. Um, his position with the players association, what he's been able to do down in new Orleans, but like now we're going to start the conversation around finding refs. How is that going to make it better? If you're a referee, you're telling me you're in a very dynamic offensive game. That's being physical that now, because there's fine to stake, that's going to make you more relaxed to call foul.

That's good. Put added on pressure. So it's not like we asked the players, Hey, your performance is bad in this game, CJ. Now, since your performance is bad, we're going to find you down the stretch. No, we don't do that to the players.

And now we're going to do it your breaths. Maybe if I would like to hear post-game press conferences from refs, cause for me at the end of that game, I actually want to talk to the ref and hear what did you see at that particular moment and maybe answer two or three calls that maybe you thought were questionable calls or here's my reasoning for why we made these calls. I'd much rather hear that as a post-game interview than hear LeBron James complain about refereeing or hearing somebody else talk. I'd much rather talk to the refs and have filing reporters question the refs on why they made the calls they made.

Here's, here's where you and I are going to part on, on that first. I think there's way too much conversation about referees. We know referees make mistakes, right? I like a pool reporter, go to ask the questions, let the, let the refs state their position on, on whatever the call is. But man, we just can't feed, we can't feed the trolls about calls. So having a referee doing a prep, I don't want to, I don't want to go there, but I do think no, I do, but I don't, I don't, I just don't want to feed the trolls. The trolls don't need feeding is, is my overall point about it. They, we, we have to minimize that.

What I do think is, is important. And I don't know that any sport really does it. Maybe the NFL does it to the best. The only thing the NFL does best when it comes to officiating is that they reward the best, right? And maybe college basketball does it too, but I'm not 100% sure they do.

We're going to talk about that in a minute. I think that like in baseball, seniority plays a role as to who gets postseason assignments as well as performance. It should simply be performance. So if you're no good, then you shouldn't get postseason assignments. And guys who proved to be no good during the course of the year, or they're all good, but not as good as the others, they should, we should know that. I don't know if there should be a referee ranking or not, but we should know that the very best get rewarded and the guys who aren't as good or women who aren't as good don't. So Adam Gould, are you suggesting some kind of public document that articulates whether, you know, scoring mark, a scoring mark for referees, top 25 referees, Scott Foster is a 93%.

You're like, okay. I, I, I like that, but that rating may go down when you call it, when he calls CP three games, you know, may go down to 40%. So I think it's a moving target, but I actually, I, I like, I know there's something like that internally. I know in MLB it's easier for, you know, umpires as it relates to, you know, black or white missing calls to that part, but I wish there was something that could track, and maybe the NBA already has this, but something that publicly we can follow to track, you know, what the hit rate for these refs are as it relates to whether they're getting things right or wrong.

Yeah. I'm sure there is an internal ranking. I'd love to, I'd love to see it. Uh, but you know what I, what I would love is we have a player's Tribune, right? I would love to see the players in all sports publicly talk about these are the good ones. These are the, these are not good ones.

Uh, again, knowing that they're all good. It's like the worst perfect, the worst player on the PGA tour is amazing. The worst player in the NBA is amazing, right? We don't understand the fans. We call them bums. I know.

I mean, I know the guy who, the guy who can barely get out of his seat calls the guy who is a part of 0.1%, a bump shocking to me, but that's the world we live in. Yeah. More referee talk for, uh, for J well.

All right. So I'm on a mission and I want your help. I want to, I want college basketball referees to stop killing the game. I want to love college basketball, but they make it hard. They make it hard. Uh, I want three things.

You can, you can tell me how many of these are good or not. I want continuation in the college game. We're taking away good plays.

Uh, I want, I want for 10 minute quarters. This is not about the referees. This is about the way the game is governed. And I don't understand. It's the only sport, the only basketball playing were part of our world that is not in four quarters, however long the quarters are. And I want to abolish the block charge.

I want to get rid of it. I hate it. My, my unofficial, uh, data is that 90% of called charges are wrong. 90%.

That number may be higher. You don't have to give me a start, Adam. I am all for increasing the number of possessions in the game. I'm all about making the game faster. Uh, I am all about like the, the whole block charge semi-circle that whole thing is outdated to me. Like the four quarters, that's where every other style of basketball has already moved to that. The women's game has even moved to that. Why haven't the men's game moved to that?

And like, I, I look, I get really frustrated sometimes. Cause I think that people often say, well, the quality of competition is not the same. I'm like, yeah, but we don't, why do we have different rules? It should be universal rules that are in place that we should follow the same guidelines to the degree that the NBA, like make it uniform. And like if we want the game to be faster and better, why wouldn't we do that?

And I know that there's different styles and different approaches. And that's what I missed about the college game. Cause you don't really have as much on the defense on the defensive and it's really said NBA, but I'm all about seeing the pace of the game go up faster and the continuation continuation aspect of the game. I've been saying that for 15, 20 years, if I get hit as my momentum is taking me on my gather to the rim, let me finish it.

That's one easily. I don't understand why they say they hate scoring. Like we hate points. We shouldn't hate points. We should like points. I mean, guys, guys are trying to score.

We should allow them to try. Like it's the old college try. I appreciate defense. I fall asleep when the games are 35 to 20. I falls.

I can't help it. It's not good for ratings. And I get that there's different fighters with different styles. Like it's like boxing.

I get it. Like Floyd made it with Mayweather is one of the greatest defensive boxers of all time. I understand that, but he at least gave me flash with like, you know, I need something as relate to our sport.

There's so much inventory that we have to find a way to market our sport differently. And to me that always starts with the defensive end. Offensive end, excuse me. Yeah, I'm trying to remember the year, but I was at one of the worst basketball. I was at the worst by a great save center court seats for the worst game I've ever seen in an NCAA final. Connecticut Butler in 2011 was a game that set the sport back. I don't even know what the score was, but it was brutal. But I was there for, I think it was Tennessee, Wisconsin. I think it was 1999.

Maybe the year before you got to Duke when they played an NCAA tournament game. And I swear the final score was 40 to 38. And I'm falling asleep. I can't. I mean, I'm here to watch.

I'm here to watch guys score the basketball. All right. We're going to fix the game. You and me together. We're going to do this. Done. Done deal. We'll make it happen. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week. Appreciate it. All right.