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.)

(* — Non-unsportsmanlike technical fouls, such as those for flopping, delay of game or hanging on the rim, do not count toward the total of two that gets a player automatically ejected.)

The preseason and beginning of the regular season in 2023-24 saw a surfeit of these calls, but they gradually faded as the year went on. Based on a search of Spotrac’s fines and suspensions database, there were eight flopping fines handed out in the first week of 2023-24 and 22 in the first half of the season, but only four after Feb. 1. (Only one player was fined more than once for this last season, and it wasn’t Dort or Dončić or Smart or Dillon Brooks. It was … Collin Sexton?)

However, in 2024-25, the fine has diminished to nearly nothing. We’ve only had five the entire season, with only the most egregious dives warranting action from Joe Dumars’ office. (Those fines are made in consultation with the officiating side, by the way.)

The technical fouls have followed a similar, albeit less extreme pattern. They spiked in the first two weeks of 2023-24 but from that point were administered a bit more evenly throughout the season. Dort was flagged three times, although two were rescinded after the fact, and Smart and Brooks were flagged twice. San Antonio’s Blake Wesley even picked up a tech for flopping in Game 81.

This was always designed to be a relatively rare penalty, rather than to “A-ha!” any player with the temerity to fall down after something less than bulldozer contact. The league’s big-picture aim was to get the most egregious acting out of the game. With that in mind, the league has a very specific definition of what constitutes a tech-worthy flop. It calls the criteria “STEM” which stands for secondary, theatrical, exaggerated movements.

“STEM is,” said Monty McCutchen, the league’s senior vice president, head of development and training for referee operations, “there’s contact, and then there’s a reaction, and then there’s a pause and another reaction, so secondary.

“And then there’s theatrical and exaggerated movements. Some of the indicators of that are: Are there multiple rollovers? Is there a large distance covered that is not equitable to the contact? Is the reaction consistent with the amount of contact that was taken? If those things are not met, then secondary, theatrical and exaggerated movements should be penalized with a flopping violation.”

Here, let’s have Zach Collins demonstrate.

A couple of small factors have somewhat limited enforcement. First, other things being equal, the league would rather make the opposite error of enforcing flopping too lightly rather than too harshly. Penalizing somebody for a tech who didn’t flop feels like a more egregious officiating failure than failing to call a flop on somebody who did.

Second, it does require an adjustment in how officials watch plays — enforcing flopping may require them to keep their eyes on a player long after the ball has changed sides of the floor. At times, that might not be the biggest priority.

Regardless, those techs — already relatively rare by spring 2024 — are as common as dodo birds during the 2024-25 campaign. For that, we have another factor to consider: the players themselves. As we see nearly every October, they adjust quickly to rules changes and points of emphasis.

“It depends on whether or not you believe the referees have stopped calling it or the players have stopped doing it,” Atlanta Hawks coach Quin Snyder said. “I think with NBA players, they are so smart and they react so quickly … (I) think it’s true in a given game, if there’s something you feel that night that a game is being called a certain way, guys have to adjust. I do think some of those plays, it’s good that they’ve focused on them and tried to minimize them.”

Just in case there is any misunderstanding, the league has put out two different points of emphasis videos on this topic since the start of the new year, one in January and one in late February.

For the TL;DR crowd, the last clip in the second missive is the one that people need to see and understand. Just because a player meets the colloquial definition of “flopping” doesn’t mean it warrants a technical foul. If a player falls down, it’s fine as long as he doesn’t make a vaudeville show out of it.

I’ve taken that play separately and clipped it below. The Philadelphia 76ers’ Paul George takes minor contact from the Denver Nuggets’ Christian Braun and goes down, trying to draw a charge. The ref isn’t buying it, but that doesn’t mean it warrants a flopping tech: George met none of the STEM criteria.

However, the flip side of the relatively rare flopping violations is that it has only made coaches and players saltier on the rare occasions when it’s called.

“It’s a ceremonial rule, that’s how I would put that,” Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “To be specific, when Dort got a flop against Boston in the third quarter of a 1-point game, and then he got another against Dallas (12 days) later, we looked it up, and at the time, they had called 10 flops all season … so you’d have to watch (nearly) a hundred games to see a flop.”

Those two techs against Dort in a period of 12 days appeared to show both sides of the issue. The first, against Boston on Jan. 5, pretty clearly shouldn’t have been called, based on the league’s stated standard.

The second was on Jan. 17, and while not in the exalted territory of Collins’ pirouette above, it likely warranted a call based on the STEM criteria. Eight months later, the Mavs finally got the whistle they asked for.

“What I want is, if they say this is going to be the rule and we’re going to enforce it, for them to just execute on that because then we know what to expect, and we can adjust,” Daigneault said. “But when they put a rule in, and they just get disinterested or they stray away from that, it’s very difficult for us to adapt to that.

“So I don’t care what their rules are, but if they’re going to put it in, and they say this is a flop, call it on everybody.”

Let’s take that talking point and turn the discussion back toward the big picture. Are the refs watching for this as intently as they were in October 2023? And is a reduction in enforcement resulting in the more egregious acts of flopping creeping back into the game?

On both metrics, the league feels pretty good about where things stand.

“We’re down drastically in both (techs and fines)” McCutchen said. “There is no internal pullback from it, let me put it that way. For the referees themselves, if we’re missing this standard, it goes in the website (and) we show them, ‘This is one that should have been gotten.’

“One of the markers we’re using internally is: Are we seeing flopping coming back into the game at a higher level because we’re down (on calls)? We’re really happy with where things are at in the league right now in terms of flopping.”

Ultimately, as an outsider to all this, a lot of this seems slightly unsatisfying. We’ve all seen examples of fairly egregious flops that don’t meet the STEM criteria, but we’d be more than happy to see them eradicated from the game.

Unfortunately, it also seems like this is the best place the league realistically can get to. When it comes to significantly boosting enforcement on this front, there’s a very good chance the cure is worse than the disease. Nobody wants players who were legitimately fouled to get a technical foul on top of a missed call.

The result is that perhaps nobody is totally happy with this — fans, players or coaches. But the NBA has advanced the ball by eliminating the most egregious flops by instituting a rule that — thanks in part to the players’ on-court adjustments — now rarely requires enforcement.

Is that good enough? It seems like it now, but remember: Rules see their greatest stress tests when the stakes are highest. With Dort’s Thunder and Dončić’s Lakers holding two of the top three seeds in the Western Conference, the flopping discussion seems unlikely to vanish this spring.

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; top photos: Harry How, Noah Graham / Getty Images)