Greetings everyone. I wanted to start this one off with a really interesting interview with someone I had been wanting to make the acquaintance of for a very long time.

I always admired him as a referee going back to when he was considered by basically everyone to be the best referee now works in the NBA's referee operations and that's my name a coach in this took place actually during half time of the Miami New York game on Friday.

And I hope you find it really interesting we get into what the league is doing in terms of training referees would have been hardest of these new initiatives to implement so I thought he was really interesting very eloquent and enjoy the conversation immensely as well.

And so our time is short here I wanted to get right to it talking about the leagues referee operations and so you moved into this administrative role a few years ago.

And so obviously the goal is to try to improve the league's processes I know the league puts in so much work on that but where do you think refereeing has most improved over these last few years?

Well we've worked really hard at retaining and building discipline within three people working together.

Three really talented officials who don't work amongst themselves and are off by themselves don't do nearly as well as three people who are disciplined who adhere to our mechanic system trust the angles trust open looks up against closed looks what I can't see as an official one of my two partners has a better chance at seeing based on a different angle.

And when we do apply that discipline we raise the level of the service to the game and I've said this in other places but NBA referees serve the game of basketball they serve the game at the highest level and when we work as a team which we have done over the last several years we are much improved and we do serve the game at a high level.

So how do you implement that how do you work with officials in maybe ways that that you weren't able to do before of getting this integrative unit that you're talking about.

Yeah, several ways one we used to have you used to be a successful referee and come into management and having been a successful referee was good enough Joey Crawford has a very famous name and being Joey Crawford or Mark Nurellick or Bennett Salvatore or Eddie Rush that was enough and you just sort of shared your experiences we realize that that was not enough and so we've gone through extensive management training about how to manage people better how to manage referees how to deliver the game.

How to deliver feedback how both in person and in writing so that it's more effective feedback we've also added some technological advancements we have an internal website called the referee enhancement performance system in which we the year that we prior to putting this in we had a thousand analog emails going back between referees and management team members.

This is a social platform internally obviously it's not an outward facing social platform but where people can share referees can go referee to referee and share interactions but even between management and referees we can click plays in real time so as we're watching the next Miami tonight I can clip a play from the second quarter I noticed you talked about the offentip fell with Julius Randall and Butler I can clip that play and I can hit.

NDA referees and 75 referees can get the proper interpretation about what we want on that play in real time and so when when we've done that we've taken those thousand analog interactions between referees and our management staff last year we had over 14,000 interactions between referees and management that doesn't include what referees are using to click play share plays in amongst themselves so the real time learning of mistakes and successes is a.

We're able to be applied immediately and share what it is that we need to have done to make sure that we're improving on a nightly basis what I'm sure it makes it easier for people to be on the same page because you're implementing this instead of being those kind of staccato conversations you can have it with everyone kind of at once and on top of that Danny we can then go and I can see what if Joy Crawford was was watching these three referees let's say let Wednesday night and he put in five six interactions per referee.

I'm watching this on Friday night I can see whether they're absolutely applying what Joey told them on Wednesday night to see if they're making the adjustments that we've asked them to in the past with so many disjointed forms of communication taking place we wouldn't always go back and check all those emails and so we've really advanced in one central place all the interactions to where we can see whether people are applying any good growth comes from one being able to take education and apply it.

But also to face your mistakes and then be able to grow out of those mistakes refereeing is a game of imperfection and what we try to do is talk about those imperfections we also try to you know support the successes but we talk a lot about the things that we don't do well and I think it's important that if we're going to ask players and teams and coaches to dedicate the amount of passion that they do we have to meet that passion and we have to meet that work ethic.

Yeah and it seems like that's it got to be invaluable for you to be able to not only just say okay your grade was X you got X never calls right X never calls wrong that's how we're grading you but you could also say this is someone who's young they have potential whenever we give them feedback they are able to improve on that that seems like someone that would be really useful for you.

And we hope people accountable through that system too so if you're doing really well and that young person consistently is applying thing you come into the league as an umpire we have crutchy for every an umpire crutchy being our highest designation but if you're doing well we can move you up to some referee spot.

Conversely if you're not doing as well not applying the feedback that we give then we are allowed to message to you that hey you have needs of improvement you may end up getting more on par so we have levels of accountability

that not only make sure that we're being held accountable but that the people who are doing the work get the accolades that are earned and deserve.

So you guys one thing that I've really loved about what the NBA has done and the the competition committee and also you all with the implementation is I think you've been more on the forefront of seeing what some of the little tricks are you know I go and back to like the 2017 playoffs where you had you know these a lot of like three

shot files where guys would just feel contact and throw up kind of a shot that you wouldn't normally take and so there have been a lot of things going to even some of the non basketball moves that were implemented last year so

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