Basketball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Paint

The Basket that Never Was

THE BASKET THAT NEVER WAS Thomas P. Flint Prologue THERE ARE EXACTLY 2.34 seconds remaining in the game to decide the conference championship, and it looks as though good old Yoreville U just might pull off an upset that will be world famous in Yoreville for a millennium. Yoreville trails Emeny by a single point, Yoreville has the ball, and Coach Quoats is using his last time-out to design a play. Actually , you and everyone else in the arena know what’s coming: somehow or other, the ball is going to South Shore, Yoreville’s famed shooting star. The players return to the court, the ref hands the ball to Yoreville’s trusty guard Gard, and we’re off. Gard inbounds the ball to his backcourt companion Dwibbles, who cuts toward the basket and passes, sure enough, to Shore. Shore hesitates for an eternal instant, then shoots. Shot, horn— which came first? You see the ball ascend, stop, descend, and . . . nothing but net. Yoreville roars, but then sees what you feared. The ref is waving off the points. The shot came too late, he says; the game clock had expired . There was no shot, and thus no points, and thus no victory, and thus no championship for Yoreville. Coach Quoats and half the crowd are livid, imploring the refs to check the monitors. They do, but the combination of poor camera angles and a technical gaffe render the available video evidence inconclusive. The call stands, and the crowd slowly leaves, angry and dejected. It’s all over. Or is it? The next morning at the office, your boss, Gervais, says he has something to show you. Gervais was at the game last night, in his usual front-row seat, and tells you he was recording parts of the contest 245 The Basket That Never Was with his new camcorder. “Take a look at this,” he tells you as he starts the disc. And there it is, plain as day. From Gervais’s perfect location, you can see the ball leave Shore’s hand while the clock in the background shows .03 seconds remaining. “We was robbed!” you scream. “No doubt about it. Shore shot in time! Two points for us!” Gervais nods, and the two of you spend the next few minutes commiserating over the injustice of it all. Act 1: Two Points or Not Two Points? That Is the Question As you return to your desk, though, confusing thoughts begin to assail you. The ball was shot before the horn: no doubt about that anymore. It went through the net—also indisputable. But does it follow that Shore hit a two-point basket? Well, you say, of course it does. Don’t the rules say that a player “shall be awarded two points” or something along those lines?1 So Shore really did hit a two-pointer—the refs just didn’t call it. But if he hit a two-pointer, then Yoreville really earned more points than Emeny, whatever the official scorer said. And if Yoreville scored more points, then Yoreville really won the game, and hence the championship. So Yoreville is the real, true champion, no matter what the league says. Facts are facts, no matter what people (or refs, for that matter) say. Wasn’t it Lincoln who once posed the question, “How many legs does a dog have if we call its tail a leg?” The correct answer, he said, was four, because it doesn’t matter what we call a tail; the fact is, it just isn’t a leg. All this makes sense. But then you start to wonder. Are there really facts here no matter what the ref, the scorer, or the league says? Well, there’s no doubt (in your mind, anyway) that there are physical facts in the neighborhood—facts about people, balls, nets, clocks, and so on— facts that are facts no matter what anybody says. Dwibbles passed the ball to Shore; the ball was shot before the horn sounded; the ball went through the net—all these are facts about the world, facts independent of anything we say or do about them.2 But basketball’s a game, and games don’t just exist on their own, independent of what we say and do. They’re governed by rules, and those rules create facts that wouldn’t be facts without our consent. Take the three-point shot. Prior to 1980, there was no three...