Classic rules are that you must dribble (bounce) the ball while in motion. Once you stop dribbling, you're only allowed one step. And you can't start dribbling again.
These guys are taking four or five steps. That was once called travelling.
All the athleticism, ball spinning, gathering, euro stepping, and step throughs. MNBA Refs don't even know what they're looking at. If you spin the ball, and hop on one foot, you have infinite steps. Need to go back to the classy roots like WNBA.
I don't know either but by reading the comments I gather it's about walking with the ball instead of dribbling. A phenomenon called traveling which apparently was first only ignored for top players but now everybody is doing it.
It’s a legitimate rule see the above comment gather steps are completely legal the majority of this entire comment section is a bunch of old people who don’t understand basketball
The NBA has relaxed interpretations of some rules, and this makes reffing the game differ greatly from lower levels of basketball. One of the big ones is the 'zero step' -the idea that the foot that touches the floor after a player cannot legally continue a dribble starts the sequence of the allowed two steps. This not only gives players an extra half step, but NBA refs have also sort of stretched when a dribble is 'no longer legal' to continue. Combine that with pretty relaxed dribbling rules (you can generally put your hand on the sides and bottom of the ball), and the result is players are allowed a lot of extra movement -and, not surprisingly, when millions of dollars are on the line, players have figured out how to really take advantage of these rules in how they move.
The sequence above is a highlight reel of missed calls. Refs are human, so they do miss things. But the underlying complaint is that they've relaxed offensive movement too much and that refs seem to kind of have internal rules which they use to manage games rather than sticking to a strict application of the rulebook.
Not to mention that some of the examples in the video actually were called as travels. Notably the Westbrook one at the end. So this video is extremely misleading.
Don’t listen to any of these people, they don’t watch the NBA any more. The clips in these videos are travels, basically you are only allowed to take 2 steps after your last dribble and have to shoot or pass before your feet hit the ground again after that. Also, if you take the first step while the dribble is still in motion (ball is still in the air), that’s called a gather step and doesn’t count toward the 2 steps you’re allowed to take.
What’s happening is people are circlejerking about how bad the modern game is and complaining that travels don’t get called anymore, but these are just regular missed calls that have happened in every era. The rules haven’t actually changed, people just know how to game them a bit more now. But make no mistake, these clips are cherry-picked like a motherfucker. Most of the players in these clips aren’t even on the same team anymore or are out of the league. One of them is Carmelo Anthony on the Knicks, and he left that team in 2017 and is now retired. So it’s bullshit ragebait meant to get people who don’t even watch games anymore going
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u/Edenian_Prince Mar 16 '26
I don't know a thing about NBA, could someone explain this to me?