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SAN FRANCISCO — Amid an NBA scoring spree in which two players, Joel Embiid and Luka Dončić, eclipsed the 70-point mark in the same week, Warriors coach Steve Kerr spoke out against the current NBA rules that contribute to such performances.
He said he expects the NBA to start rolling back some rule changes that have led to offensive outbursts.
“I think there are absolute changes (to be made),” Kerr said before the Warriors’ matchup with the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday. “You’re not going to make changes to the scheme. Where you’re going to make changes is with the defensive positioning rules that are in place.
“I wish I could tell you the number of times a player wildly drove into us, ran into us, and I went to the ref and the ref used the expression, ‘illegal guarding position.’ The way we’re interpreting the rules is favoring the offense. Just as we did 20 years ago as a league, when we wanted to open up the game, we changed the interpretation. So we could easily go back and give leeway to the defense.”
Kerr previously went off on the officiating following a Dec. 25 loss to the Denver Nuggets, when he said he didn’t blame the refs, but the rules they’re instructed to follow. The Warriors lost, 120-114, while giving up 32 free throws in the game.
“If I were a fan, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch the second half of that game, it was disgusting,” Kerr said at the time. “It was just baiting refs into calls, but the refs have to make those calls because that’s how they’re taught.”
He called the current NBA a “parade to the free-throw line.”
Teams are currently averaging 115.6 points per game, the highest per-game scoring average the NBA has seen since 1969-70, when Jerry West (31.2 points per game) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (28.8) contributed to an NBA average of 116.7 points per game.
