There’s a scene that replayed itself over and over during last spring’s thrilling Western Conference semifinal series between the Dallas Mavericks and Oklahoma City Thunder.
The script went like this: Luka Dončić would drive into some contact from Luguentz Dort, Dort would go down, and Dončić would turn to the official and immediately ask for a technical foul for flopping. Sometimes he’d put his hands together for a technical foul signal. Sometimes he’d have his palm flat to the floor, lifting it up and down — the official signal for a flopping violation. One time, he and Kyrie Irving managed to synchronize their requests (see second clip below):
Either way, Dončić’s intention was clear: He thought a technical foul should have been called for flopping.
Dort wasn’t called for a single flopping violation in that series, although he is among the rare few to have been whistled for it this season. (Dončić wasn’t exactly innocent when it came to over-embellishment in that series, either.)
But the fact Dort wasn’t whistled, even when he was doing what most fans would consider flopping, isn’t wrong.
And as we turn toward another playoff season where this topic will likely come up again — possibly between the same two players — we need to talk about the league’s flopping rules. In particular, we should discuss how in-game whistles and postgame fines for flopping violations have all but vanished this season, and why that is.
Let’s start here: It turns out that, when it comes to officiating a basketball game, the definition of “flopping” is slightly different from the one we might casually use to describe a piece of foul-drawing artistry.
The mere act of Dort or Marcus Smart or any other defender falling down on a play that isn’t a foul doesn’t automatically make it a tech-worthy flop in the eyes of the NBA. Moreover, the league doesn’t want to be in the business of making distinctions on this fine a line; what it wants is to eliminate the most egregious acts.
To that end, the NBA came up with two different mechanisms before the 2023-24 season to punish flopping: a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul that can be whistled on the spot, and a $2,000 fine that can be administered after the fact if a call was missed during the game. (The fine replaced a previous mechanism for administering after-the-fact flopping violations.)
