NBA refs and the legislative problem of street-level bureaucrats
In Congress, and in government generally, one basic problem is enforcement of law. Although sometimes people on the Hill act like you solve a problem as soon as you pass a law, the reality is that almost every legislative act requires some amount of executive implementation and/or enforcement.
We often think about this as an elite-level problem. How will the White House prioritize where to put their energy and political resources? How well will the political appointees govern the agencies and implement law? What criminal laws will DOJ emphasize and deemphasize, given limited resources and prosecutorial discretion?
This is all natural, and it's one reason that policy can change so much from administration to administration, even without much change in law. Executive governance exists in both natural and delegated discretion in law. The choices made by executives matter.
But a more basic question of governance discretion resides with the street-level bureaucrats. These are the agents of the government who literally implement and enforce policy. Cops and teachers. TSA agents at O'Hare and park rangers at Yellowstone. Whether or not they have legal discretion over policy implementation, the fact that they sit at the actual point of implementation gives them a lot of control. It's a very clear principle-agent problem for the legislature.
At the extreme, it gives them a full veto over legislation. And this constrains both the legislature and the executive leaders as to the laws and policy they can construct. The street-level bureaucrats simply will not implement some laws. You can legislate that the penalty for drunk driving is the death penalty. But it won't work. Cops will simply stop arresting people for drunk driving. No one is going to make that arrest, especially someone pulled over on a neighborhood road, who hasn't caused an accident. Or, perhaps worse, they will only selectively enforce against "people who deserve it." Likewise, if you tie school funding to test scores, teachers are going to be very tempted to make sure kids pass the tests.
All of this is to say street-level bureaucrats are going to occasionally behave in ways that reflect an independent sense of policy goals, fairness, and justice, even if it doesn't exactly conform to legislative intent, and sometimes even if it wildly diverges.
I say all this because the NBA Finals featured a couple good examples of this, with the referees seemingly using their veto power as street level bureaucrats. Turns out, the same governance problems you have in government also apply to spots. In particular, the difficult issue is the calling of flagrant fouls (which are for unnecessary and/or excessive contact, and differ from the regular common fouls that happen all the time.)
What happened was this: several times, the referees didn't call fouls which, had they been called, would have resulted in the Spurs young superstar, Victor Wembanyama, either being suspended for the following game or getting dangerously close to being suspended. Although Wemby had committed clear and obvious fouls in the context of the individual play, the referees were seemingly taking into account the bigger-picture of the series and the larger consequence of calling an otherwise-ordinary foul on Wemby.
The issue was that Wemby had accumulated 3 flagrant foul points during the playoffs (two for a flagrant-2 foul in an earlier round, and one more for a flagrant-1 foul during Game 4 of the Finals). If you [accumulate 4 flagrant points] total during the whole playoffs, you are automatically suspended for the next game.
Consequently, the referees may have taken that into account on any given subsequent play. Even if Wemby did commit a flagrant-1 foul, the penalty was no longer 2 free-throws and the ball back for the Knicks. It was that plus the best play on the Spurs sitting out the next game.
This puts the referees in a terrible spot. The accumulated-points system means that any given flagrant-1 foul might not be a huge deal itself, but might carry a massive series-changing penalty. It's not surprising that the referees are hesitant to call such fouls. They are typically loathe to make themselves the center of the story, and getting Wemby suspended for a game on a questionable flagrant call would be, from their point of view, the definition of injecting themselves.
On the other hand, not calling the flagrant fouls obviously hurt the Knicks in the moment. Even worse, NBA rules allow teams to challenge common fouls to have them upgraded to flagrant fouls. So the referees couldn't just refuse to call flagrant fouls when Wemby did something that might have deserved one, they had to refrain from calling any foul, because the Knicks could challenge the call and get it upgraded!
This happened at least twice. In Game 3 of the Finals, Wemby threw Jalen Brunson to the ground, an obvious flagrant foul. Nothing was called, not even a common foul. Note that Wemby would only have been suspended for a game here if this was ruled a flagrant-2 foul, he hadn't gotten his 3rd flagrant point yet (that came in Game 4). But it certainly felt like this call was ignored to prevent having to make a decision about whether this was a flagrant-2.
The more obvious non-call was in Game 5, when Wemby can be seen clearly putting himself in Brunson's landing zone and clipping his foot on a shot. That's an automatic flagrant-1, and would almost certainly have been called in a regular-season game. Or perhaps if Wemby didn't have 3 flagrant-points.
What can be done about this? One issue is whether you want to put the refs in this situation at all. While you can't totally avoid it no matter how you structure the point system, having it carry over through the whole playoffs sets you up for these suspension to ride on very flimsy calls, when the bulk of the offense occurred weeks earlier against completely different teams. And if the refs aren't going to make these calls when superstar participation is on the line, you should probably rethink it. Especially if, as in the case here with Wemby, it might be causing them to not call common fouls.
Another option is to make everything reviewable after-the-fact, by the league. That's already mostly the case in the NBA. And since all of this is happening in public and recorded by 50 different cameras, the oversight process on referees is a lot easier than most street-level bureaucrats. But shifting things to the front office doesn't solve the underlying tension here. It just puts different actors into the tough spot.
Circling back to government, one key lesson here is that you can't legislate without taking into account executive implementation, including how street-level bureaucrats are going to respond to your law. Whether that's fair or not is irrelevant. If your mission is to create effective policy, it's just reality. And failing to consider the dynamics of implementation at the ground level can easily cause you to mistakenly enact policy that could never work or, perhaps worse, policy that could have worked had you taken it into consideration.
But, in the end, this is not completely solvable, in government, sports, or corporation. Street-level actors are going to put things in context, and are going to be risk-averse about using their authority in ways that have huge impacts. I have heard that Charlie Reliford has said about being the home plate umpire when Roger Clemens threw Mike Piazza's broken bat in game 2 of the 2000 World Series, "I'm not throwing Roger Clemens out in the first inning of a World Series game."