NBA To Experiment With Coach Challenges During Summer League

The NBA will use this July’s Las Vegas Summer League to test out a new coach’s challenge system for referees’ calls, sources tell ESPN’s Brian Windhorst. According to Windhorst, league officials are still working out the exact details of how the system will work, but it won’t involve a flag like the NFL.

As Windhorst observes, the NBA has frequently used the Summer League as a testing ground for possible changes to the game, including expanding officiating crews and adjusting goaltending rules.

Despite the fact that the league has increased its use of replay in recent years, a coach’s challenge system is unlikely to take effect in the NBA next season either, even if the Summer League experiment goes well.

The NFL, NHL, and MLB all currently employ some form of coach’s challenges, but each league has a number of rules governing which calls can and can’t be contested. In order to implement its own form of challenge system, the NBA would have to determine which calls could be disputed, how often a coach could use a challenge in a given game, and how the challenge process would be initiated, among other factors.

Currently, the NBA G League uses a basic system that allows coaches one opportunity per game to challenge a foul call, a goaltending/basket inference decision, or an out-of-bounds play.

“We’ve wanted to do it [in the NBA] for years,” NBA executive vice president of basketball operations Kiki VanDeWeghe said on SiriusXM Radio on Sunday, per AJ Neuharth-Keusch of USA Today. “The competition committee has been trying to figure out how we actually do this, because there’s some complications. It’s not quite as simple as you might imagine. We’ve had it in the G League for a number of years now and it’s been very effective. We’re going to try it in a very limited form in Summer League and we’re going to see how it goes. We’re going to let everybody look at it.”

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