An NBA referee's life: More than balls and whistles

YEARS AGO, when Bob Delaney was a referee in the NBA, the normal procedure on a game day was to go to the nearest Blockbuster and rent three videos.

It wasn't a way to kill time in yet another city that was part of the traveling grind. Back then, when you rented three videos you were given a free VCR for 24 hours. That way Delaney and partners could watch tape of the game they had just called and use it as a learning tool.

Both electronics and refereeing have come a long way. Preparing for a season has become much more involved. Being on the floor for the 48 minutes of a game is the biggest part of what a referee does, but it really is a small component of what goes into the job these days. There are endless hours of watching video. Self-evaluation is a must. There are daily emails about certain situations that arose in the prior night's games. Mechanics and positioning rule the day, and everyone lives by the mantra "Have fun and take care of each other."

Overseeing it all is former Saint Joseph's standout Mike Bantom, the executive vice president of referee operations, a post he has held for three years. He has been with the NBA for 25. Delaney, a former New Jersey state trooper who famously infiltrated the mob and then was an NBA ref for 25 years before retiring in 2011, is director of officials. A tireless worker, Delaney thinks outside the box when it comes to ways of improving the performance of the 64 NBA referees.

During a recent meeting at the NBA offices in uptown New York, Delaney turned on the oversized television in his office and called up a teaching lesson that was shown to all his "players" (Delaney says he is part of a team, with Bantom the GM, him the coach, the refs the players. He is aided by many "assistant coaches" who are also former refs, such as Joey Crawford, Mark Wunderlich, Bernie Fryer, Eddie F. Rush, Bennett Salvatore and Violet Palmer.) The screen lit up with three movie scenes. The first was the famous courtroom scene between Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, the second a violent confrontation in The Godfather with James Caan and the final the landing scene in the movie Sully where Tom Hanks calmly steers the damaged plane into the Hudson River.

The point is to show the calm way Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger not only landed the plane, but communicated to air control. It is the way refs are taught to handle volatile situations during games, whether with coaches or players. Mixed in with the many tutorial videos are motivational speakers, stories of real-life heroes, lessons from world events. The Martin Luther King quote, "A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus," sits in Delaney's office.

Bantom's crew is keenly aware that trying to teach everyone the same way would never work, as not everyone comprehends the same. Videos not only show an area of concern, they often display when someone has done something exactly the way they all envision.

"I think officiating has improved because I think there is more of a structure to it," said Bantom. "When I played, you had different referees and they were big personalities. Joey is like the last of those types of referees. You had the Mendy Rudolphs and the Darell Garretsons and you knew when those guys showed up, the game was going to be called a certain way. Whereas now, we're really trying to standardize how the game is called. No matter who you have out there on a given night, we want it to be called a certain way, according to the same rules, the same calibration. You have 64 individuals, so it's never going to be perfect, but it's not like when you had two guys out there and one of them was this huge personality who was going to call the game his way. But you knew that and after you played a few years, you knew how to adapt your game to how an Earl Strom was going to call it.

"You don't want that to be the case now. It's too important now. It's viewed on a much wider scale and it's too easy to break it down. I think that if you had that now there would be too many inconsistencies and you don't want that. You want it to be consistent and standardized."

And although perfection will never be reached, by either players or refs, excellence is the goal every night for the three people officiating any given game. And if a little help, like a replay, is needed, Bantom and his team are all for it.

It is a big reason the replay offices, in a beautiful building in Secaucus, N.J., were built a few years ago, to add more ammunition in the battle for that excellence. There, two referees are assigned each night, sort of "on call" in case the officials calling a game need to verify a shot beating a buzzer or whether a sneaker tip is brushing the three-point line on a shot. While, to some, it may bring a dehumanizing factor to the game, it is a valuable tool in helping officials get it right.

"I learn a lot by sitting here and learning the dynamics of how we all think," said referee Eric Lewis, a 13-year veteran. "When I watch our guys it gives me another perspective on how I would handle a situation. Being here and seeing the resolution of the play and seeing how we handle it and how the players respond is so valuable. We all have ways that we deal with players and they respond to different people. If I use something and it blows up in my face, I can look at our guys here at the replay center and see how they may handle a situation better. We don't get to experience every situation in a game, so we watch these games here and we see things that maybe we haven't seen before. And since you saw it, now you have an idea of how to handle it."

As much as shooting form is key for a player, mechanics rule an official's life. When the game was one that attacked the basket and was mostly played inside the paint, that is where the officials needed to concentrate their attention. Now with the more wide-open style prominent, there is so much more area to cover. It led to the changing of positioning a couple of years ago, so that when three-pointers are shot from way out, an official already is set in a position to watch, instead of having to run out to the shooter to check where his feet are.

"We tell our guys that when they are sitting in a room or sitting on a plane, they should be working their vision angles," said Delaney. "The same way you can build these muscles (arms), you can build your eye muscles. Younger referees that have never really concentrated on this thing, they don't see big. We need them to see big.

"We ask them to put tape on fast-forward. Then if you can see things when doing that, when you go to the floor you see them looking slower. If every decision you make is looking slower to you, that's good. If you're a high school official and you watch a college game, you see play at a faster speed, so you can use that to quicken your mind. If you're a college referee, you can watch NBA games and you can see it quicker. The problem for NBA referees is there is nowhere else to see it faster, so the only way to do it is to manufacture it.

"Anything we can do to get them to see things at a slower pace is good.

"If our mechanics are on the money, our rewards will come with high accuracy. We can't be searching around for just call verification and say we got plays right," said Delaney. "We're not going to be consistent then. We are going to kick plays. We know that. But we're not going to change the system because we kicked a play. We know that this works and the best evidence is that no one is talking about Game 7 last year. Those guys worked. Their mechanics worked as well as they could be done. It's about getting the discipline, the focus, awareness, execution.

"The theory that you can call a foul anytime in the NBA game is not a true statement. There is contact that comes that doesn't affect the speed, quickness, balance or rhythm. If that's impacted on the floor or in the air, it's a foul. It's not about whether the ball goes in, whether a guy dunked it. If he's hit and strong enough after he has his balance and rhythm to score the ball, you still have to put him on the line. You can't pick and choose where you're going to do that. It would be so inconsistent."

Another video Delaney showed concentrated on the way referees communicate with players and coaches. One instance had a ref vehemently wiping off a shot he thought was attempted after the buzzer. While his arms are quickly crossing his body, he is calmly saying to a disagreeing coach that he will check the replay.

He did. The call stood. The replay worked. The official handled his temperament properly, his mechanics were perfect, in the right place at the right time. That makes for a good night for the whole crew, whether watching from the New York offices, the replay center or in the comfort of their homes.

Still, the work never ends. Besides the 48 minutes, an official does far, far more work than the average fan can imagine. And with hundreds of years of combined experience Bantom and his crew have in the game, they will always find more.

"We make far less mistakes during a game than a player does," said Bantom, who played nine years in the league. "And yet, everybody wants to harp on the mistakes that an official makes. Our players and coaches are quick to openly demonstrate the fact that somebody made a mistake. Whereas there's this unspoken rule amongst players and coaches that you don't do that to each other. I think that we're just as much a part of this family and of this game as the players and coaches are and we're trying just as hard. I think they ought to be given that same type of respect."

If everyone knew the time and effort they put into their profession, perhaps they would.

cooneyb@phillynews.com

@BobCooney76

Blog: philly.com/Sixersblog