Tuesday July 12, 2016, Las Vegas, NV --- It’s Sunday afternoon at Thomas & Mack Center and I sit down next a familiar face. Wearing a bright yellow polo shirt and peering over a pair of reading glasses, Joey Crawford watches the Kings-Rockets Summer League game with a trained eye.
He offers a smile (yes, Joey Crawford does smile) and a handshake, asking me about my recent trip to Switzerland. He knows because we’re Facebook friends. Stunning, I know.
Now officially retired as an active NBA official, Crawford is now in management with the NBA’s referee operations department. I ask him what he’s doing and he opens a folder to show me a sheaf of evaluation sheets.
You see, it’s not just players who are nurturing their NBA dreams during the Samsung Summer League. There is another group of young and hungry professionals who are also nurturing NBA aspirations.
Summer League games are assigned to D-League officials and younger, less-experienced NBA referees. The Summer League games are opportunities for both to enhance their careers.
For the D-League referees, it is an opportunity to showcase their skills in front of larger audiences, national television, and the keen eyes of senior NBA referees and front office personnel.
For the junior NBA referees, it’s an opportunity to get in more reps before the season starts and an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be a crew chief, which carries extra pressure and responsibility.
In the stands of section 103 at the Thomas and Mack Center and along one wall of the Cox Pavilion, members of the NBA’s referee operations department, assisted by current referees, evaluate the officiating of Summer League games.
Later Sunday afternoon, Zach Zarba, one of the twelve referees selected to work the NBA Finals this season as well as last, watches the Chicago-Philadelphia game unfold. He notes in a black notebook the times of particular plays that he’d like to look at again on video and discuss with the crew. He is not formally evaluating the officiating crew on a call-by-call basis, but is there to note certain items such as clarity and precision in hand signals, positioning and on-court presence.
When halftime comes, he walks down to the officials’ locker room and goes over the first half video with them. Meanwhile, in the row of seats behind me, three D-League officials quiz each other on the rules.
One of their conversations deals with what happens when a team is down to five eligible players and one is assessed a sixth foul that, under normal circumstances, results in disqualification. What do you do? That player has to stay in, but that sixth foul (and subsequent fouls by that player) is a personal foul and a technical foul. Even if a player has been disqualified by fouls and there are only four eligible players left, the NBA doesn’t let you play five on four.
These are the types of conversations that referees have, constantly reviewing rules and officiating the game from the stands. The longer you are around them, the more you understand how much they care for the game and how badly they want to make the right call.
And you understand that they’re human. Zarba tells me that the legendary referee Steve Javie (whose father was an NFL official) encouraged him to involve his dad in the important moments in Zarba’s career: first game, first playoff game, etc. Zarba’s first NBA game was in Orlando and so his father (a former baseball umpire) was in the stands. The younger Zarba was understandably nervous, but when he looked up and saw his father, “he was white as a sheet.”
His father can be more relaxed these days as Zarba has now worked his way into the upper echelon of NBA referees and now passes on his knowledge to a new generation of officials – and curious broadcasters.
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