As the NBA returns for the 2022-23 season, the league is hoping for one pesky recurring element from last year. won’t be coming back: the take foul.
After increasing numbers of intentional fouls to prevent fast-break opportunities reached critical mass in 2021-22, the NBA took corrective action by importing a version of the transition take foul rule used in the G League since 2018-19.
Now, if a defender is judged to have prevented a transition opportunity without making a legitimate basketball play, his opponents will get a free throw (taken by any of the five players on the court) and possession. League officials believe it will make taking fouls a thing of the past and allow NBA players’ skills to shine in the open court.
“We want an environment for them to show their best, and we think this new rule gives us more transition opportunities,” said Monty McCutchen, the league’s senior vice president and head of referee development and training.
“Which, oddly enough, most people view as an offensive issue, but some of our best, most historical plays are defensive transition plays. As such, we want that whole environment of transition basketball to be back into the NBA game, and we think this rule helps us get there.”
Using play-by-play data from the NBA and the G League, let’s take a look at how implementing the rule worked in the developmental league to help us understand what impact this rule might have this NBA season.
How taking fouls grew into a problem for the NBA
It’s worth remembering that the NBA already had a tool to combat intentional fouls in transition: the clear-path rule, which actually dates back to 1984-85 but evolved into its modern format — penalized by two shots and possession — in 2006-07 .
As written, the clear-path rule is designed only to prevent fouls in the most obvious fast-break situations when there is no defender ahead of the player with the ball. That created the opportunity for defenders to exploit a loophole to foul while in front of the ball handler, even if the momentum of the play created an advantage for the offense.
Many of the earliest NBA practitioners of the take foul were players who learned it playing overseas, leading to the nickname “Euro foul.” But In 2017, FIBA modified its unsportsmanlike foul rule (equivalent to the NBA’s flagrant foul) to prohibit unnecessary contact that stops the progress of an offensive team in transition, making these fouls primarily an NBA problem.
Beginning this season, there will be a heightened penalty (1 free throw + possession) for intentional fouls committed by defenders which deprive the offensive team of a fast-break opportunity. See below for an educational video regarding “Transition Take Fouls”: pic.twitter.com/aOf1ZrqAu5
— NBA Official (@NBAOfficial) September 26, 2022
The term “take foul” originates from the league’s play-by-play system, which allows scorers to designate intentional fouls committed for a variety of reasons. Fouls to give, or to get the ball back in the late stages of games, are taking fouls.
So too are “Hack-a-Shaq” fouls, committed to sending poor shooters to the free throw line. Still, those have become less common in recent years.
Stripping out take fouls in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter and the final minute of other periods gives us a reasonable estimate of plays that would fall under the new “transition take foul” criteria and highlights their increasing frequency.
As recently as 2017-18, there were just 0.32 fouls per game outside the ends of quarters and games. The following season, that almost doubled. By 2020-21, teams were combining to commit about a take foul per game. And last season, that jumped to 1.4 — an increase of 332% within a four-year span. (Notably, the total number by this method is similar to the 1,700 transition take fouls cited by the NBA).
The rule has been tested in the G League …
While NBA teams were ramping up their use of taking fouls, they’d all but disappeared in the G League outside of late-game scenarios. In 2018-19, with analysts already highlighting taking fouls as an issue in the NBA, an experimental rule was introduced in its official developmental league.
As soon as the G League began calling transition take fouls, the first conclusion was obvious.
“One, that it works and that we get a lot more transition basketball,” McCutchen said.
“One of the key takeaways is that when you have a heightened penalty, it becomes less attractive to enact this foul.”
Because the transition take rule was implemented so early in the G League, the strategy never really caught on. There were 72 total fouls taken outside the final minute of periods during the 2017-18 season before the rule change, an average of just 0.1 per game.
After the rule came in, taking fouls outside the final minute of quarters almost never occurred. There were seven total marked in 2018-19, which decreased the following two seasons before bouncing back slightly to 15 in 2021-22.
That example paved the way for the NBA’s competition committee — made up of representatives from team ownership, basketball decision-makers, head coaches and the players’ association — to adopt a similar rule over the summer after concluding the increasing number of fouls needed to be addressed.
Based on experience in the G League, the NBA’s version of the rule expanded to add the possibility of transition take fouls being called when no legitimate play is made defensively against a player who does not have the ball in transition or immediately after a change of possession .
… but it remains a work in progress
Because fouling to stop fast breaks had become such a habit, the rule will be tested more in the NBA than it was in the G League. In particular, the league’s craftier players might take advantage of the ability to prevent transition opportunities by going for a steal knowing such plays (highlighted in the league’s video explaining the rule) won’t be considered transition take fouls.
“We’re not so naïve to think that they won’t disguise some of this, but we want a legitimate, and we’re emphasizing that word, a legitimate play on the ball,” McCutchen said. “If you do that, then we want good play to continue.”
The NBA will monitor those plays to see whether changes to the rules need to be made. We’ve seen similar evolution over time with the clear-path rule, which will continue to remain in place when players commit fouls in transition that meet its stricter criteria, producing a stiffer penalty of two shots and possession.
Although the transition take foul penalty isn’t as severe, it will still hurt a team in all but the most desperate situations. Last season, teams averaged 1.08 points per possession after non-shooting fouls, according to Second Spectrum tracking. The value of the penalty free throw should be similar to what we see with technical fouls, on which the league shot 81% last season.
Add up those two values, and a transition take foul will cost teams about 1.89 points on average, almost as much as a sure dunk or layup in the other direction. As a result, players will be incentivized to avoid the kind of obvious intentional fouls that had become common place.
“If we eliminate the vast majority of those,” McCutchen said, “I think we’re going to see this as a success.”
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