ESPN’s Danny Green: NBA version of MLB’s ABS challenge system would be ‘terrible idea’

Danny Green doesn’t want any part of an NBA version of MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System.

Green, a 14-year NBA veteran and current ESPN analyst, was asked during a conference call with reporters about ABS, which MLB introduced this season to considerable success, and whether a player-initiated challenge system could help curtail the endless arguing that follows referee decisions in the NBA.

He didn’t let the reporter finish the question.

“Terrible idea,” he said. “A player challenge, they’d challenge every damn play.”

ABS has been one of the cleaner rule changes baseball has seen in recent memory. When a catcher, pitcher, or batter believes a ball-strike call was wrong, they tap their helmet, an automated system reviews the pitch, and a verdict comes back in seconds. In baseball, that situation arises once or twice a game at most, which is exactly why the system works as well as it does.

Basketball doesn’t work that way. Foul calls happen on nearly every possession, judgment calls are constant, and the line between a legitimate grievance and a player just being frustrated with an official is blurry enough that the current challenge system — one per game, earned back only with a successful challenge — already strains against the pace of play. Giving players the ability to initiate their own challenges on top of that, Green argued, would make an existing problem considerably worse.

“Players doing that or challenging plays, I think, would be very chaotic and hectic,” he said.

His actual preference is a tweak to what’s already there rather than anything resembling what MLB has built. Under his model, each team would get two challenges per half, lose them regardless of whether the review goes their way, and potentially burn a timeout in the process as a deterrent against using them frivolously.

But the thing is, the two sports don’t even handle the challenge process the same way to begin with.

MLB built the infrastructure around immediacy — broadcasts on a nine-second delay, strike zone graphics stripped from jumbotrons, pitch location data pulled from in-stadium monitors — because a challenge has to happen the moment the call is made, a batter or pitcher tapping their helmet before anyone has time to think. In the NBA, a coach calls a timeout, consults the bench, and decides whether it is worth the challenge. That is already a slower, more deliberate process, and it is the coaches making the call, not the players. Putting that decision in the hands of players, in a sport where the next foul call is never more than a few seconds away, is what Green is pushing back on.

“A player challenge, they’d challenge every damn play,” he said.

It’s worth noting that baseball players, operating under a system with far fewer opportunities to challenge, have already shown a tendency to misuse them. Green’s point is that the NBA would be exponentially worse.