NBA NOTEBOOK | From the Finals

NBA stays with instant replay: The NBA's instant replay system was an instant success this season. The league's review system won't change when it returns next fall, NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik said during a low-key State of the League address with commissioner David Stern on Friday night before Game 2 of the NBA Finals. The replay system allows referees to take another look at plays in the final few seconds of each quarter. After a series of bad calls in the 2002 playoffs, league officials rushed the system into the rulebook. This season, it wasn't the deciding factor in any game, and it has barely been used in the postseason. Still, the league believes it's working. "We feel it worked very well this year," Granik said. "As luck would have it, it hasn't had any great impact on the results of games. But that's OK, because we now think we have a system that can be pretty effective." According to Granik, who recently attended a meeting of the league's competition committee in Chicago, the system was used 421 times this season, but only 28 times at the end of a game. The officials' initial call was overturned just 13 times -- barely more than 3 percent. The competition committee also was pleased with the rule changes allowing certain forms of zone defense. According to Granik, the changes have curtailed isolation plays. "You don't see situations where you might as well have sent three or four of the offensive players into the parking lot to play 1-on-1 or 2-on-2," Granik said. "We really think we have something now where all five players have to play, and there's a lot more ball movement, and it looks a lot better." In other news, Stern still hopes the league and the union will agree on a minimum-age requirement preventing teenagers from joining the league, though no concrete proposals have been discussed. "Increasingly, we are going to have a number of kids that throw their hat into the ring here under 20 that don't make it," Stern said. Though it would require an aggressive expansion of the league's developmental league -- and though it probably would lead to a few talented teenagers playing overseas -- the league would like to protect veterans' jobs with an age requirement. But only to a point. "It's not something we'd go to war over," Granik said. The competition committee recommended two minor rule changes for next year: The shot clock wouldn't be reset to 14 seconds following a jump ball, and teams wouldn't be charged with two timeouts after calling a 20-second timeout and a full timeout while a player is down with an injury. The recommendations still must be approved by the teams.
NBA stays with instant replay: The NBA's instant replay system was an instant success this season. The league's review system won't change when it returns next fall, NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik said during a low-key State of the League address with commissioner David Stern on Friday night before Game 2 of the NBA Finals. The replay system allows referees to take another look at plays in the final few seconds of each quarter. After a series of bad calls in the 2002 playoffs, league officials rushed the system into the rulebook. This season, it wasn't the deciding factor in any game, and it has barely been used in the postseason. Still, the league believes it's working. "We feel it worked very well this year," Granik said. "As luck would have it, it hasn't had any great impact on the results of games. But that's OK, because we now think we have a system that can be pretty effective." According to Granik, who recently attended a meeting of the league's competition committee in Chicago, the system was used 421 times this season, but only 28 times at the end of a game. The officials' initial call was overturned just 13 times -- barely more than 3 percent. The competition committee also was pleased with the rule changes allowing certain forms of zone defense. According to Granik, the changes have curtailed isolation plays. "You don't see situations where you might as well have sent three or four of the offensive players into the parking lot to play 1-on-1 or 2-on-2," Granik said. "We really think we have something now where all five players have to play, and there's a lot more ball movement, and it looks a lot better." In other news, Stern still hopes the league and the union will agree on a minimum-age requirement preventing teenagers from joining the league, though no concrete proposals have been discussed. "Increasingly, we are going to have a number of kids that throw their hat into the ring here under 20 that don't make it," Stern said. Though it would require an aggressive expansion of the league's developmental league -- and though it probably would lead to a few talented teenagers playing overseas -- the league would like to protect veterans' jobs with an age requirement. But only to a point. "It's not something we'd go to war over," Granik said. The competition committee recommended two minor rule changes for next year: The shot clock wouldn't be reset to 14 seconds following a jump ball, and teams wouldn't be charged with two timeouts after calling a 20-second timeout and a full timeout while a player is down with an injury. The recommendations still must be approved by the teams.