MONTY MCCUTCHEN AQ &

At the professional level, perhaps no league has embraced a 21st century approach to officiating as strongly as the NBA. Referee talked to Monty McCutchen, the bow-tied senior vice president who oversees the league’s development and training of officials, about such wide-ranging topics as promoting young and diverse officials at an accelerated rate, working within the NBA’s “Respect the Game” initiative, the use of published late-game analyses to help improve officials’ accountability and more. The interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

If we go back 10 or 20 years and look at what someone needed to have to break into the NBA officiating ranks, they had to have a pretty substantial amount of officiating experience. Now, we’re starting to see a lot of officials who have less than a decade of officiating experience under their belt and they’re breaking into the NBA game. To what do you attribute that?

One of the distinctions I would make is that good training is good training. It doesn’t have to be at the NBA level or at the college level or at the high school level. Good officiating really doesn’t change along those different markers of achievement. And so, for us, there is no conscious effort about when we get someone. We have a scouting department that looks at between 3,000 and 3,500 referees a year. Those are in summer camps, those are in high school seasons, those are all over the board. They’re out and about looking at referees. So we don’t care where someone is.

Is there a conscious effort to get officials while they’re younger and maybe haven’t developed bad habits yet? Have you found training has improved where officials are more advanced more quickly?

Age is not a determining factor for us. Can you apply the standards of what good officiating looks like? Can you stand in the proper place based on a mechanics system that has been presented to you? Can you look and sequence your eyes to pick within your primary coverage area aggressive or engaged matchups? Can you find the moving players within your primary coverage area? When people can apply that training they garner more attention, they get fed more information. And we find that when people can apply large amounts of information in quick order, they advance quickly.

Now, I would challenge a little to the fact of what inexperience looks like. Seven or eight years, if six of them are in our G League, is six strong years of training, refereeing one of the best leagues in the world that is not the NBA. And it’s my own opinion, biased though it may be, that (the G League) is the second-best league in the entire world. So when you get 4-6 years worth of training under a same coaching system, under a same mechanics system, under consistent messaging, then that is very concentrated training.

Is how soon you can identify an official and get them into the NBA officiating pipeline more of a priority than requiring a certain amount of overall officiating experience?

One of the issues that all referees coming up have to deal with — this is no fault, I don’t place fault in it — is that when we’re young, we’re all having to answer to many different people with many different philosophies. And that dilutes training when you work in this league — if you have to do this and you have to do something different in another league. That doesn’t mean the training in various leagues is bad. It just means that you’re concentrating constantly on change. We are afforded the luxury at the NBA to have one system that works across our entire ecosystem.

In addition to the NBA officiating staff getting younger, it is also becoming more diverse in other areas. Has there been an effort to achieve a more global, cosmopolitan feel among the staff?

I will say this: There hasn’t been any push for that. I haven’t been told that one time. What I do get the luxury of is working for a company that doesn’t limit my ability to see talent, and I think that’s an important distinction to make. The fact of the matter is we work for a company at the NBA who by demand is the best league in the world. For me to limit half of the population of the world, i.e. women, from the talent of serving the game of basketball at its highest level, is shortsighted. And I’m proud to work for the company that I work for because it allows me to go out and all I have to do is recognize talent. Forty-two percent of our G League officials last year were women. And as such all I have to do is pick the best referees, and by default some of them are going to be women because they apply all those things that we just discussed. Or, as Intae Hwang has proven, someone from South Korea being in our G League.

All I have to do is send our scouting teams out with the proper instructions, and here are those instructions. This is a true meritocracy. If you can do the work and you can apply the concepts we find valuable to good officiating, then it is my responsibility to the game, it’s my responsibility to the NBA, to make sure you have the opportunity to grow to your full breadth. And if you can do that and apply all those concepts, then I have to take you on because that’s what the NBA game at its highest level deserves, is that kind of service.

The NBA has aggressively started to promote its “Respect the Game” initiative. Why is that important to the NBA officiating department? How do the two work together?

Our job is to enact what is important to the game of basketball, and most certainly what is important to the values of the NBA: respect, respect for the game, respect for each other. And listen, I know that referees all over the world take criticism, and that’s part of being a referee is to take on criticism. I think we have to recognize two things: That the game of basketball isn’t about officiating. It shouldn’t be about officiating. We serve the game as officials. And that’s a wonderful service and role to provide the love of sport.

But it can’t be about you as the official. It has to be about the standards everyone has agreed upon. We want the focus to be on players, coaches and their franchises, not the relationship between players and coaches, franchises and the referees. Now, I don’t live in a fantasy world. I realize that teams’ desire to win is very passionate. There’s going to be criticism. You have to have some toughness as a referee to deal with appropriate criticism through good communication skills. If you can explain your decisions with good communication through the actual rule of what is allowed and not allowed in the rule, you negate a bunch of criticism. You have to be able to be a good communicator through the rulebook. And that’s why it’s so important that we harp on, “You better know your rules.” It’s not just a matter of whether you can apply the correct rule. It’s can you explain your decisions coherently and with conviction so that the game participants start to gain trust in your ability to administer properly the rules of the game. It brings confidence in everybody.

Speaking of rules, the NBA’s emphasis on traveling has been evident this season. Has there been a conscious decision made by you or the league as a whole to look at footwork a little bit closer and to determine what is legal and what isn’t?

Our stakeholders meet as a competition committee, and that’s three coaches, three NBA governors, three general managers, three players and then there’s league office non-voting members that give the league’s perspective on things. One of the things that came up in the offseason was the need for better footwork. It used to be 10 players below the free-throw line. If you missed a small step, there was nowhere to go, you ran into another player really fast. And so, in a very tightly contested game below the free-throw line, the physical nature of defense then became your concentrated effort. As our game has evolved and now we have the floor spread out and most of the game is played above the free-throw line, most of our picks, most of our screening action, is around the elbows now. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And so, with help defense having to close out, the game is now played in open space. If we miss bad footwork in open space, there is little hope that NBA defenders can play and keep up with the skill sets of our offensive players. And so, it became our stakeholders’ view that we needed to then get better at footwork.

That means a new way of sequencing your eyes. What we used to say is, “Referee the defense.” We say that now, but it’s at the end of a different sequence. We now are really harping on the sequencing. Good refereeing is learning how to sequence your mind to inform your eyes where things take place and no illegal act has taken place — remember, we’re dealing with space now; defenders are usually farther away — we can then transition our eyes to referee the defense after we have cleared that.

Often with rules points of emphasis, there is a major emphasis up front and then it tapers off. What do you do to maintain the standard that has been established during the first three months of the season until the final whistle in June?

It’s more important it remain consistent through (future) seasons and it’s not June. Because if we’re consistent with our work, then coaches can coach it and players can make adjustments. One of the worst things we could do they should be. When I inform my eyes through the proper sequencing, and I need to get better at traveling, footwork, then what we sequence our eyes and train is find the catch or the gather sequence No. 1; then find the legal pivot foot, sequence No. 2; then wait on the legal dribble or a legal two steps forward or backward. If those three is do it for this season and then say we don’t want to do it moving forward. Here’s the great thing; I don’t care how many travels are called. I don’t. We’re not looking for a quota of travels. What we’re looking for is to get illegal footwork called properly based on our rulebook. And so when we change our sequencing,

I’m much more involved in making sure that someone’s eyes are doing the proper things. And when the eyes are doing the proper things, NBA officials — officials all over I would think — are really good at going ahead and calling the play. The key is, do we continue with the proper sequencing? That’s my job, to make sure that they’re doing the proper sequencing.

The amount of travels will always fluctuate based on those things I just said. And what I mean by that is this: If we are consistent in our sequencing of eyes and applying the rule as it is written, coaches coach it better, players adjust. It’s invariably true that they may go down. What we need to see is whether there’s a corresponding increase in incorrect no-calls. And if we see that increase, that’s my responsibility to get that under order. But if we don’t see an increase in incorrect no-calls and they’re going down, then that means coaches and players have done an incredible job of making the proper adjustments. With all the data we collect at the NBA, we’re allowed to see that level of scrutiny as to wherein lies the problem.

What I can promise you is the messaging won’t change. Because I think it’s unfair to players and coaches to change messaging when, in fact, the stakeholders have charged us with getting this adjudicated properly. And so, I’ll have the will to see this through, and I know our players and coaches have the abilities as the best in the world to make proper adjustments.

Being a modernday NBA official now means adding to the toolbox things like public-speaking skills in having to make in-game announcements and explanations — and off-floor skills, such as working in the league’s replay center. Can you share a little bit about what you do from an NBA perspective to get officials trained up in these areas and how it’s not just about play-calling on the floor?

Good referees embrace change; they don’t resist it. That’s how dinosaurs came to not be is a lack of adaptation. We at the NBA really talk a lot about this idea of embracing instead of enduring. And if you look to embrace change instead of endure it, then you’re excited when there’s a piece of technological advancement that allows you to not have to think about this little piece. The essence of officiating won’t change if we end up being able to find tracking devices that help with very difficult goaltending calls. You’re still going to have to be there to break up altercations and call fouls. And to have a piece that makes that job not so difficult, it’s something to be embraced, not run from.

Within the technological changes, within how the game is changing, you have to always be open and receptive to how your mechanics might need to change because of the speed of the game changing, etc. We talked about the idea that the game used to be played below the free-throw line, and now it’s above the free-throw line. Early offense yields the best shots, data says. So teams are pushing plays, so we have to make sure we’re in place at a much quicker clip so we’re in the proper positions to see plays in those first seven seconds when shots are most likely to be taken. All of that means that if you embrace change and then apply the proper training for that change, you can then be successful. If you go kicking and screaming all along the way, and you have a class of referees, experienced referees, saying, “Yeah, we’re not going to do it that way tonight,” then they have outlived their usefulness to serve the game.

All across the sports landscape, and especially with the influence of social media, there has been increased noise about the need for accountability for officials. The NBA has addressed this in part with its use of the “Last Two Minutes” reports (L2Ms) that break down how the officials perform at the end of games. Can you speak to that and what type of accountability those breed?

NBA referees do excellent work. You’ll notice very clearly I did not say perfect work. When you do excellent work, it’s OK to then own the imperfections. You can be confident enough to say we made a mistake here and be honest and transparent about it. The L2Ms are just one way in which we do that. I don’t mind supporting referees when they’re right. That’s my role. Neither do I mind if we did something wrong, own that and train up to it, to be held accountable and to say, OK, we’ll get better at that. We’ll continue to teach toward better results in this way. And it’s the only authentic way to go through any life it seems to me.

Referees serve the game. I’m a broken record here. But within that service of the game, it’s OK to admit you’re wrong. Now, you can’t admit you’re wrong 14 times a night. Now you’re not living up to levels of standards of competence that we need to be at.

But the L2Ms show that we’re pretty good in the last two minutes. Again, not perfect. The goal is perfection, but you realize that through that driving toward perfection that’s sort of always just exceeding your grasp, you can reach levels of excellence.

Owning the imperfections through public acknowledgment and/or private acknowledgment with teams, coaches and players when they talk to you about plays, breeds confidence that you are a person of integrity, a department of integrity, a league of integrity so that we can all work toward better and higher levels of performance whatever our role is in serving the game.

As someone who is involved in officiating at the highest level, do you have any words of wisdom for those who are just starting out on the officiating journey?

If you’re starting early in refereeing, congratulations. Start the right way. Get in your rulebooks, your manuals and your casebooks. Because not only will it empower you to adjudicate the game properly, it will give you the confidence for that court presence that we talked about so that you can know that you have done the work. And confidence as I see it is nothing more than the innate knowledge that no one has outworked you. If you’re young and getting started, outwork every imagined person in your head, and it will breed a confidence that makes you a very strong and trusted referee. *