What’s Really Behind the Shocking Drop in Referee Scoring Accuracy?

Jaylen Brown’s Saturday night performance wasn’t just a game—it was almost a quiet rebellion. Picture this: 23 aggressive drives into the paint against the Spurs, yet not a single free throw awarded. Zero. Nada. The Celtics, a franchise steeped deep in history, ended up shooting only four free throws all game—one of the eeriest lows you’ll ever see. And you can bet Brown wasn’t holding back his frustration. After the buzzer, he didn’t mince words, lambasting the officials for invisible foul calls, fully aware he’d catch the league’s wrath—and sure enough, a $35,000 fine followed swiftly. The big question now? What exactly is causing this bewildering shift in officiating that’s echoed not just on courts, but rippling through locker rooms, coaching staffs, and even Vegas sportsbooks? With scoring dipping and unders cashing in record numbers, the NBA’s landscape seems to be shifting stealthily beneath our feet. Hold onto your hats—this might just be the beginning of a far bigger story unfolding on the hardwood. LEARN MORE

Jaylen Brown clearly had enough on Saturday. Despite driving into the paint 23 times against the San Antonio Spurs, the most that any player in the NBA had gotten downhill on that particular day, the former Finals MVP finished with zero free throws in the hard-fought game. The referee crew deemed that he was not fouled on any of his 23 drives or 28 shots from the floor. In the four-point loss, the Celtics took just four free throws the entire game, the second fewest in the history of the Celtics’ storied franchise.

After the game, Brown blasted the officials for not calling fouls, knowing full well the league would not be pleased with his pointed commentary. He then took to X and doubled down. (He was promptly fined $35,000.)

“I’ll accept the fine at this point. I thought it was some bulls*** tonight,” Brown said in a minutes-long rant in front of reporters. “The inconsistency is f***ing crazy. Give me the fine. I got my conspiracies or whatever, but I don’t know what’s going on.”

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Brown wouldn’t specify the particulars of his theory, but he’s far from being alone in getting fed up with officiating this season. Brown is the latest player to get fined for comments or gestures toward the officiating — Dillon Brooks and Marcus Smart also got dinged earlier this season.

Three head coaches were recently fined by the league office for publicly criticizing referees within days of each other. Elsewhere, Steve Kerr had to be physically separated from crew chief Brian Forte last week while being kicked out of a Warriors game. After Monday’s loss to the Pacers, Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla mocked officials by repeatedly answering “illegal screen” in an apparent attempt to draw attention to Pascal Siakam’s pancake on Derrick White in the closing seconds. (The NBA’s L2M report said Siakam indeed should have been called for the foul.)

Aside from the public comments, a larger storm has been quietly brewing. Scoring has collapsed across the league and it has disrupted a key league partner. Among those who are trying to figure out what’s going on with officiating are sportsbooks and the gambling community.

In January, including the Brown rant game, free throws have suddenly plummeted across the NBA, which has consequently suppressed scoring totals and led to a relentless cascade of bets cashing the under on point totals. In the long run, sportsbooks are quite efficient in predicting point totals and typically see over/under bets cash closely around 50% on either side, just as it had in October, November and December this season. But in the month of January, according to the Odds Shark bet tracking database, unders have cashed a remarkable 64.7% of the time, with normally sharp bookmakers wildly underestimating the mark on a nightly basis.

One longtime professional bettor flagged the sudden change in free throws early and told Yahoo Sports he has been hammering the unders: “We r printing (money) lol.”

Brown, coaches and sportsbooks are all wondering: What, if anything, is happening?

Free throws and fouls way down

It wasn’t long ago that teams enjoyed nightly parades to the free-throw line. During the opening weeks of the season in October, there were eight instances of a team shooting at least 40 free throws in a game. Contrast that to just two instances of a team shooting fewer than 10 free throws. In November and December, the big charity-stripe nights far outpaced the tiny ones.

But here in January, that ratio has flipped on its head. There have already been nine single-digit free-throw games in two weeks, the same number as November and December combined.

Other parts of the game have stayed remarkably consistent. Two-point field goal percentage is almost identical month-to-month, while 3-point field goal percentage has slightly dipped to 34.7% in January compared to 35.5% leading up to it. Turnover rate and 3-point frequency has also held firm, according to pbpstats.com tracking.

But free throws? That’s been the main driver of the scoring decline. Team trips to the charity stripe, according to pbpstats.com data, have fallen from 26.1 free throws per 100 possessions in October to 24.6 in November to 23.1 in December to finally 21.7 in January, representing a nearly 20% decline from October to January in free-throw rate.

The end result is games are seeing about eight points on average being wiped away in the month of January.

The betting community has tried to keep up with the sudden drop in scoring. Sportsbooks have lowered the expected point totals further and further trying to find footing. According to Odds Shark data, the bottom began to fall out on Jan. 1 when all five games cashed the under and then proceeded to have a run of unexpectedly low-scoring games. In the first 12 days in January, not a single night on the schedule saw more overs than unders on the game slate. Between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, the results tilted way off-balance; there were a whopping 20 unders to just six overs.

Then on Jan. 10, the night of the Brown rant, Vegas bookmakers issued the lowest over/under line of the season, listed at 214.5 for the L.A. Clippers at Detroit game. They combined for 190.

On Monday night, four of the six games cashed the under, headlined by yet another single-digit night from Boston in the free-throw-attempt column. Vegas set the over/under total at 227.5 points in the infamous “illegal screen” night from Mazzulla’s news conference. Indiana and Boston combined for just 194, with neither team reaching 100 points. Indiana also finished with single-digit free throws.

The story of the night was Mazzulla begging for a foul call and not getting it.

The 2024 parallel

This wouldn’t be the first time the league saw a midseason change in how tightly the games were being called.

In early March 2024, I reported that teams were seeing a precipitous drop in scoring, anchored mostly by a sudden decline in free throws granted by officials. Were officials told to allow more physicality? There were weeks of denials, first to Marc Stein at The Stein Line and then from the league office headlined by then-executive vice president Joe Dumars and senior vice president of referee development and training Monty McCutchen, discrediting the notion on The Lowe Post on ESPN that they secretly decided to let the players play more.

In April, the league changed its tune. After the board of governors meeting, commissioner Adam Silver announced at a news conference the league had made “a bit of an adjustment along the way” in how the game was being officiated in order to bring more balance to the game.

“We get feedback from our teams and we calibrate as we go in terms of how people view the game,” Silver said. “I think there was a sense earlier in the season that there was too much of an advantage for the offensive players.”

Translation: The league pulled the strings to give certain advantages back to the defense. Which, by the way, I’m not arguing is a bad decision. The league kept it a secret and didn’t tell anyone outside of the referees. Not the teams. Not the media. And sportsbooks were, just as they are now, trying to list accurate over/unders without complete information.

This is important stuff. Relatedly, the NBA recently mandated teams to list accurate injury reports every 15 minutes, which was widely seen as a way to serve sportsbooks and help protect against inside information malfeasance in the wake of a bombshell gambling scandal.

Did the league office make another adjustment on the fly?

According to several head coaches and executives around the NBA, a league memo hasn’t been sent out to alert the stakeholders the game was being officiated any differently. But some team analytics groups have tried to make sense of the new officiating trends they were seeing and presented the data to front offices and coaching staffs, according to sources who spoke with Yahoo Sports. Many insiders have expressed skepticism that there is an explanation beyond an officiating alteration like the one seen in 2024.

So what’s changed exactly?

If players and head coaches want consistency, some areas of the game seem to be handled differently these days. But I should point out that one area that has been called consistently throughout the season is the foul rate on drives. Looking at the player-tracking data, 7.1% of drives have resulted in a foul in January, which was the same exact rate in December. That’s not it.

Looking elsewhere, there are some clues as to why scoring has fallen lately. The biggest call that seems to be impacted is the three-shot foul, which in terms of referee power, may be the single-most influential call in the game. Anytime one whistle can give a team three points instead of zero is going to be scrutinized.

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Turns out, the proportion of fouls that are called on 3-point shots has declined by 26% from October to January. Prolific three-shot foulers Jalen Brunson, Donovan Mitchell and Keyonte George had totaled 38 three-shot fouls entering January. Since the New Year? They’ve totaled one combined. Two other proprietors of the three-shot foul, Austin Reaves and Jerami Grant, simply haven’t played.

Though the downturn in three-shot fouls may have led to some unhappy 3-point shooters, it has almost certainly improved the flow of the game. (There’s a reason why the G League goes with a one-shot free throw to earn 1, 2 or 3 points for the first 46 minutes of the game.)

In the aggregate, though the three-shot foul had been the more notable culprit to the early-season free throw parade, fouls on 2-point attempts have also dropped by about one per team per game in January. That might not seem like a lot, but even one less foul call means a lower likelihood of playing in the bonus, which helps to keep scoring totals in check.

It remains to be seen if the January drop will stick for the rest of the season. Teams, fans and sportsbooks would certainly like some normalcy. But a return to early-season free-throw levels can’t be ruled out. If you ask Jaylen Brown, maybe the only consistency is the inconsistency.