The Wild West of NBA Jump Balls

Joey Crawford had a bone to pick with Shaquille O’Neal.

Crawford doesn’t remember the year, though he thinks the encounter likely occurred before one of numerous playoff games he officiated featuring Shaq. As players warmed up pregame, Crawford approached the legendary big man with a long-standing gripe surrounding an embedded basketball tradition: the jump ball.

“I noticed, ‘Goddamn it, he’s stealing my toss. He always steals my freaking toss!’” recalls Crawford, one of the most demonstrative and recognizable officials in NBA history, and now a referee developmental adviser for the league.

Crawford is referencing a simple jump ball rule that requires players to wait until the ball has reached its apex before they touch it. “Stealing” the toss before that point is one of many tactics that players throughout history have used to get a leg (an arm?) up on fellow jumpers. Crawford and other referees always come back to Shaq as the most effective jump ball thief of his time—able to tip the ball early, but not so quickly or obviously that it drew a whistle.

But on this night, the NBA officiating legend wasn’t having it.

“I walked out and I just looked at him and I said, ‘You’ve been stealing my tosses. [But] you’re not getting it tonight,’” Crawford says. “He just looked me right in the eye and said, ‘It’s my job to steal it.’”

Just a few minutes later, Crawford was eating his words. “I threw [the ball] up, and I just barely got it up” before Shaq stole it, he says.

It probably looked something like this—the ball hardly out of Crawford’s hands before a lightning-quick O’Neal smacked it out of the air:

It’s perhaps unsurprising that O’Neal stands as the most dominant jump ball taker in modern NBA history, winning more than 75 percent of his tips since data became available in play-by-play logs in the late 1990s. “He was huge and incredibly athletic,” you’re thinking. “Of course he was the best at winning jump balls.”

But to many of the game’s longtime stewards, there’s more to it. Shaq and other jump ball specialists through the years have employed a blend of gambits in pursuit of victory: timing, obsession, and, yes, a willingness to push the boundaries of the rule book—and dare referees to push back.

The jump ball is simultaneously one of basketball’s oldest traditions and one of its most curious regular events. Each jump ball is its own game-within-a-game, at once a primal contest of athletic prowess and a constantly evolving game of chicken between players and refs—and among jumpers themselves. There’s at least one jump ball in every single NBA contest, and most have a limited impact on the winner; rare exceptions, though, come at huge moments and can swing games.

And in today’s modern, increasingly standardized game—especially where referees are concerned—the jump ball is also a persistent vestige of a bygone era. It’s among the last true Wild West frontiers in basketball, marked by the same foggy rule interpretations, quirky styles, and sense of lawlessness that characterized the first jump balls ever thrown.

How has the jump ball endured for more than a century? How have Shaq and other elite practitioners bent and even broken the rules to gain an edge, and do referees have enough tools and incentives to stop them? Will the jump ball always be a central part of the NBA game? Should it?

James Naismith himself threw the first jump ball in basketball history back in 1891. It’s been a fixture of the sport ever since.

Naismith’s original vision for the sport featured a jump ball at the start of each quarter and after every made basket. This was scaled back at the NCAA level in 1937, when the ball started being awarded to the scored-upon team after buckets.

The NBA used this approach from its inception in 1949 until 1975, when it removed jump balls to start quarters two through four and installed the system we know today: one jump ball to begin each game and any overtime periods, plus a jump ball for any tie-up during play. (The loser of the opening tip receives the ball to start the second and third quarters; the winner gets it again to start the fourth.)

Even when they were more common, jump balls were never a major priority of NBA referee management. Some refs threw with one hand, almost mimicking a jump-shot motion. Others threw with two, and still others used hybrid approaches that involved bouncing or tapping the ball.

The NBA has never mandated any standardized mechanics for throwing jump balls. “It was not a front-burner thing,” says Ed Rush, a legendary referee who also served as director of officials for the NBA after leaving the court. “It was just one of those things where they basically said, ‘You have to be able to do this.’”

This affords refs a bit of individual personality in their tosses, and no one has embodied that like Ken Mauer. Nearly every ref surveyed for this story mentioned Mauer when asked to recall the most singular jump ball tossers they’d seen.

Mauer, a longtime fixture in playoff and Finals games, used an extreme variation of what’s termed the “pulling” technique in officiating circles, where the referee backs their body out of the circle while throwing. Mauer explains that he was elbowed by jumpers a few times early in his career and needed to find a technique to avoid that risk without compromising the effectiveness of the toss. Where some refs pull slightly, though, Mauer took multiple steps back, then tossed at an angle with a surprise motion that almost made him look like a volleyball player setting the ball for a teammate:

Mauer’s peers talk about his toss with a mixture of reverence and amusement. The thing just looks goofy.

It was effective, though. “The jump ball doesn’t have to be thrown straight,” Mauer says. “The jump ball has to end up in the middle of both players at the peak of where the ball should be tapped. It doesn’t matter where you toss the ball from.”

NBA management has historically agreed with Mauer’s sentiment. As long as the ball goes where it’s supposed to, the brass doesn’t care how it gets there, or even who throws it—while crew chiefs are the most common throwers, they can defer to another ref on the staff if their toss is considered superior.

Some officials defer based primarily on physical safety; several former refs carry horror stories with them from the jump ball circle.

“We were working the old Eastern league. That’s where people worked before you go to the NBA,” Rush says. “[The jumpers are] sorta leaning on each other; I’m physically getting in between them.

“And as the ball went up, [a guy named] McCoy reached out to go get his arm up to the ball, and he hit me in the side of the head. Blood all over the place, I had a broken nose. After that, I had what golfers would call ‘the yips.’”

Rush rarely threw another jump ball in a 30-plus-year career, deferring to his partners whenever possible. Stories like these are common among old-time officials: Fellow legend Steve Javie even recalled one game when a referee was taken off on a stretcher after being knocked out by an errant elbow on a jump ball.

“Some of them might have been intentional by the player,” joked Don Vaden, former NBA referee and director of NBA officials who now works as a “ref whisperer” for various NBA teams.

Other veterans defer the toss as a sort of tongue-in-cheek rite of passage, a way to mess with their rookies.

“Guys would sit there and say, ‘Hey, Steve, I’m a really good tosser. I can do it.’ I said, ‘OK, fine, go do it,’” Javie recalls playfully. “His first toss, I’d be the non-tossing official and I’d blow it back and go, ‘Nope, off on the right.’ He’d throw it up the second time. ‘Oh, off on the left.’ … Just to bust his chops.

“I would never do that [on a jump ball] at the free throw circle when the game was on the line. But just to have some fun with the tossing official at the beginning of the game.”

Training for jump ball tosses has been similarly ad hoc. Just a couple of rudimentary drills have been passed down the officiating ranks over the years.

“One is you stand underneath the basket, and you toss the ball so it goes up through the rim, so that way you know you’re straight,” Rush says. “And the other one is to get next to the wall and toss the ball so it goes straight up in the air a few inches from the wall, but doesn’t touch the wall.”

From the grading of every single call to the use of virtual reality and other cutting-edge approaches to referee training, most elements of NBA officiating have been fully modernized—and with good reason. Rules should be applied uniformly to any game, especially one with billions of dollars at stake.

Not the jump ball, though.

Jump ball training for today’s officials? It’s the exact same as it was in the mid-’60s, with refs standing under a hoop and tossing the ball up through it. There are still no standardized leaguewide mechanics for throwing a jump ball. And while other decisions that refs make throughout a game are analyzed with numerous camera angles and slow motion, jump balls simply don’t receive the same level of attention.

“We’re not capturing every jump ball, rating it A, B, C, D, E, grading it 1 to 10, anything like that,” says Steven Angel, the NBA’s senior vice president of game analytics and strategy—the man in charge of the team that grades referees. “When there’s an issue, we would forward that on [to referee management].”

Instead, jump ball techniques have been passed down communally among officials for decades.

Much of that has coalesced around the concept of misdirection to prevent jump ball “stealing,” which Shaq and other top jumpers throughout history are so practiced at. It’s difficult to gauge the expected apex of a tossed ball, especially with two giant people leaping after it directly in your line of sight; savvy players know this and constantly test the limits. In the NBA’s nascent days, referees collectively realized that keeping players off guard—forcing them to jump a beat or two later, as the toss was already in the air—was their best chance at consistently getting the ball to its peak.

Every ref develops their own nuanced style. Crawford had a method of moving his head side to side, ostensibly checking all 10 players, before suddenly tossing the ball up with two hands. Rush would talk to the jumpers, then toss mid-sentence to surprise them; Javie and current NBA ref czar Monty McCutchen would also bounce the ball while talking, randomizing their bounce height and the number of bounces to keep players guessing.

Vaden would wait until both jumpers were set, then rock forward on his feet as if to throw the ball—typically fooling both players and getting them on their toes. “As soon as they both rocked back and got low, I would throw it,” Vaden says. Zach Zarba, one of today’s elite NBA officials, who has called several consecutive Finals, uses a similar extra pause.

This is a tougher task than meets the eye. Refs work hard to avoid tipping their hand (literally). A key goal is to eliminate any downward motion directly preceding the toss.

“When you bring it down, now [jumpers] know it has to go back up,” Zarba says. “If you load up on your jump ball—when you start to throw if you crouch down, or bring the ball down in any way—they are good enough to time that.”

There’s another simple reality at play here, too: Jump balls have no standardized height. Most jumpers for the opening tip will be around 7 feet tall, sure, but what about various exceptions? Multiple former refs joked about their relief at never having to toss a jump ball for Victor Wembanyama—how do you calibrate consistently for that? (If you’re wondering, Wembanyama is 38-20 in the circle so far in his rookie year, an elite 65.5 percent figure.) What about when two 6-foot guards are jumping after a tie-up? Tosses to a typical height will be too high.

That’s of particular concern for taller refs like Kevin Cutler, a 6-foot-8 former player at Long Beach State and in the Drew League. Cutler uses a modified one-hand toss that’s well above his head when the ball is released, quickly putting it well above most jumpers. Cutler rarely gets his jump ball stolen as a result, but does occasionally deal with a ball falling back down, untouched—maybe not ideal, but still preferable to concerns about theft that other officials deal with.

(In fairness to Cutler, what exactly were the two jumpers in that clip doing?)

Even those issues are rare for Cutler, who is considered one of the premier jump ball throwers in today’s officiating ranks.

He showcases the work many refs put in behind the scenes to master their craft. Cutler’s height makes the traditional “throw the ball up through the basket” practice technique less useful; he’s already nearly at the rim with his tossing hand. So for years, Cutler would get up at 4:30 a.m. to enter an empty aerobics room and practice using his own self-taught methods.

“You find a point on the ceiling or the roof and you toss to that point,” Cutler says. “As long as you cannot see that point on the ceiling, up and down, you’ve got a good toss.”

Cutler’s dedication has paid off. His reputation precedes him with most fellow referees; even when he’s not the crew chief on a given game (Cutler is among a tier of refs who will sometimes play this role, but also sometimes be the no. 2 on a staff), he estimates that he’ll be asked to throw the opening jump ball 85 to 90 percent of the time—a real point of pride.

That pride is visible across the officiating ranks. Like most fellow referees, Mauer thinks of the jump ball toss as a skill to be honed through repetition. But he also considers it a lasting scrap of referee personality worth holding on to.

“I’m not a believer that you have to make referees robots, in more ways than just throwing the jump ball,” Mauer says. “Yes, rules and regulations and certain mechanics have to be standardized and carried out by all referees, but the individuality of a referee—I hope that is never completely taken away. And yeah, one little minor way might be to throw a jump ball.”

Refs aren’t the only ones building unique, personalized strategies around the jump ball circle, however.

Be honest: If you were speculating about which of Shaq’s contemporaries were similarly dominant jump ball winners, Yao Ming would be among your first guesses. Yao was one of the only guys to ever truly tower over O’Neal on a basketball court—surely his size allowed him to easily win most tips?

Not so much.

While Shaq won over 76 percent of his jump balls in our data set (which is scraped from play-by-play logs and goes back to 1997), highest among all volume jumpers, Yao posted 207 wins and 288 losses, a paltry 41.8 percent win rate. This dichotomy between two of history’s biggest players makes it clear: There’s more to jump ball success than height and heft.

It all starts with timing. The best jumpers know refs are trying to surprise them; they don’t fall for various distracting tactics. Look how much sooner Shaq was in the air on this jump ball than his opponent—it was over for poor Matt Geiger before he even left the floor.

(That’s Crawford on the toss. Was that another of Shaq’s thefts prior to the apex? It’s truly hard to tell, even in slow motion.)

“He had it timed so well that he could get it,” Crawford recalls. “He may have had [other refs] timed, too.”

Through Turner representatives, O’Neal sadly declined an interview request for this story. Others have taken on his mantle, however—and pushed it even further, in some cases.

Andre Drummond, who boasts a 563-203 career jump ball record (73.5 percent), sits second behind Shaq for winning percentage among players who primarily jump at center court. The Chicago Bulls center is a timing savant, consistently off the ground before his opponent:

Both of Drummond’s feet are often already well in the air while his opponent’s remain firmly on the floor:

That’s no accident, either. Drummond tells The Ringer he regularly completes tennis ball drills and other exercises to keep his reflexes sharp. “My reaction time is what I really depend on,” he says.

Drummond is also a studied practitioner of the jump ball dark arts, one of the best at toeing the line between legal and illegal. He’s a regular jump ball thief, including some examples that are almost hilariously quick (but again, are almost never called):

He’s also an expert at leveraging his combination of bulk and athleticism. Knowing he’ll typically be first in the air, Drummond will often jump subtly into his opponent’s airspace, turning his shoulder and torso to limit his opponent’s jumping height and retaining his high ground:

Look at how Drummond cuts into LaMarcus Aldridge’s jumping area on this tip:

He’ll even go with an outright hold-down using an off hand here or there:

This is where the jump ball really turns into a cat-and-mouse game. Timing the ref’s toss is imperative, but what if the other guy times it—and you—even more effectively?

There’s an implicit understanding among all parties that jump ball infractions aren’t usually called to the letter of the rule book, especially opening tips, when subsequent-quarter possession will even out anyway.

“You’ll see bad tosses that are either too low, too high, or they’re not straight, that should be called back and they’re not,” Rush says. “It’s almost like you don’t want to start the game off on a negative note or hurt your fellow official’s feelings.”

The data paints an even starker picture of lawlessness in the jump circle. Of 1,986 jump balls logged by Angel’s team for the 2022-23 season, just six violations were called. That’s a rate of 0.3 percent, or a violation once every 331 jump balls. This figure doesn’t include “re-tosses,” when the official restarts the entire process with a new throw even though there’s no player infraction, but anecdotally these are similarly rare. A Wild West, indeed.

As such, top jumpers have developed their own hacks to push the envelope.

“I know when I play against Steven Adams, he likes to hold arms down with his off hand to get to the tipped ball,” Drummond says.

(It works, too. Adams’s 70.7 percent career win rate is in the top 10 among modern volume jumpers.)

“Some guys like to use their arm and put it in front of yours so they can tip it back,” Drummond continues. “There are different strategies for how you can get an advantage when it comes to jump balls. And a lot of it depends on the ref and how they throw it. You can prepare all day, but if they throw it slightly to the other side, the advantage is immediately gone.”

Some jumpers, such as perennial MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo, often favor the forward tap. Antetokounmpo’s 76.1 percent career win rate, which trails only Shaq’s since 1997, is somewhat artificially inflated by the fact that most of his jumps come on tie-ups and therefore are often against smaller opponents.

But with such a huge advantage, Giannis uses the jump ball for predatory purposes. When he notices players crowding the circle behind him, expecting him to tap the ball back, he sometimes executes planned actions to manufacture a quick bucket. Notice how teammate Bobby Portis boxes out the man next to him as this ball goes up, knowing Giannis is about to tip it forward to him for a layup:

These sorts of circle alignment tactics are another frontier exclusive to the jump ball. If an elite jumper or a major height advantage is in the circle, should the opponent stack players to the side he usually wins to? Or could that risk exploitation from savvy leapers like Giannis?

There are actual rules here: For tie-up jump balls at either free throw line, the team attacking that basket gets to place the first player around the jumping circle, with each team alternating one player at a time from there. But it’s common for players to, shall we say, temporarily forget these rules (some may never have learned them), especially for a jump ball late in a close game.

Speaking of rules, here’s one you likely didn’t know: It’s perfectly legal to tip a jump ball into the opponent’s basket. While no one interviewed for this story could recall a successful tapped jump ball bucket, several refs figure it’s only a matter of time before some savvy giant like Antetokounmpo, Wembanyama, or Chet Holmgren pulls it off. In an extremely short shot clock situation, when winning the tap to a teammate and getting a shot off is unrealistic—and especially with the height edges these guys so often have—why not take a shot at two points?

Jump ball nuance reaches peak nerd status, however, when you talk to NBA coaches. Some analytically inclined bench bosses really go galaxy brain.

“In theory, if you lose the [opening] jump ball and you get the two-for-ones at the end of the first and second quarters, you now have two opportunities to maybe get three-for-one instead of two-for-one since you get the ball back [to open the second and third],” says Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy. “So there are some people who might even argue that losing the jump ball is OK from a possession standpoint, if your team is really good at manipulating the two-for-one. We’re going down the rabbit hole now.”

Clippers coach Ty Lue takes it further: He roots against his center at the opening tip, saying he’d rather get the ball in the second and third quarters. This is much to the chagrin of said centers, including Ivica Zubac.

“I know [Zubac’s win rate] is not good,” Lue says with a chuckle. (He’s right. Zubac has a career jump ball record of 171-244, or 41.2 percent.) “I wasn’t going to say that, but I know. He knows as well. He gets mad every time he loses it, and I’m happy.”

Those high jinks naturally go out the window in overtime or during tie-up jump balls, which don’t even out possession-wise later in the game. A jump ball late in a close game is one of the most intense events you’ll see in the NBA.

“Say there’s a held ball out on the perimeter and you have a tie game and there’s 12 seconds to go, and now you have a jump ball,” Crawford says. “Around that circle, you have mayhem.”

It can take refs minutes to legally position players around the circle, and then reset them as guys try to jump in early. When possession can be the difference between a win and a loss, toss theft risks are sky high—as are things like arm contact, hold-downs, and more.

This is one of the most challenging play types a referee can face. Elite athletes are springing to action at full intensity all around them, with injury risk certainly heightened. Then there’s the simple matter of timing.

“If you’re in the middle tossing the ball, and there’s two seconds left on the shot clock and the offensive team gets the ball back, you have a responsibility to get out of the way, number one, and to actually help referee the play that’s going to take place,” Vaden says.

These instances are so challenging, in fact, and so meaningful to games when they happen, that some in the officiating world are uncomfortable with them. Should referees even play such a direct role in these moments?

When the NCAA moved from jump balls on tie-ups to the use of the possession arrow in 1981, the reasoning was clear: Those in charge did not believe referees could consistently throw quality tosses that maintained fairness.

“We had several crucial moments down at the end of some games where the jump ball was thrown lousy—didn’t get up high enough, or didn’t give everybody a chance,” says Hank Nichols, a longtime NCAA official and Naismith Hall of Famer who served as the NCAA’s coordinator of officials after leaving the floor.

Nichols also noted the general chaos inherent to many tie-up jump balls. To him and many others in officiating circles, fairness is better served with a neutral arbiter like the possession arrow. (FIBA also uses alternating possession.)

“There’s nothing really wrong with everybody sharing the next possession,” Nichols says. “It’s a fair deal. You don’t have to deal with a bad toss, somebody stealing the thing illegally on the jump ball, pushing people around—you don’t have to deal with any of that. That’s the reason they changed it, and in my opinion it’s stood tall as a rule change.”

Should the NBA consider a similar move?

Most parties agree that jump ball tosses are imperfect, but their degree of concern varies. Some, like Vaden, estimate that 15 to 25 percent of jump ball tosses are bad; others like Hardy think it’s closer to 50 percent. What to do about these and other jump ball issues, if anything, is another question with varied answers.

Vaden prefers the possession arrow, citing both the chaos and time wasted setting up for many tie-up jump balls. Rush doesn’t love the jump ball, but prefers it to the alternative in fairness to the athletes.

“Let’s say you’re behind by a point, and you’re playing great defense and you’re fighting like crazy and you get a tie-up and then you don’t have the arrow,” Rush says. “It’s kinda like, life’s not fair here because you’re not getting the ball.”

Some traditionalists like Mauer never want to see the jump ball changed. They view it not just as the fairest approach, but also as a longtime league practice that makes the NBA unique—and allows refs to retain that little bit of personality on the floor.

Crawford has perhaps the most nuanced take: He’d support changing the jump ball rule if it were truly unfair, but has yet to see enough evidence of that.

“If it’s proven that our staff sucks at tossing the balls—first quarter, overtime, [tie-up] jump balls—then we should change it,” Crawford says. “I think [we should change it] if you can actually prove that.”

Crawford may get his wish sooner than expected. Per Angel, jump ball tosses are one of several areas being probed by league data engineers utilizing new 3D skeletal pose tracking from Hawk-Eye. As long as some initial issues with this system are ironed out, jump balls could soon be evaluated for horizontal and vertical planes, toss angles, apex measurements—and perhaps even actual metrics to determine whether one jumper was favored over the other on a given toss.

But would that really be a good thing? Should yet another basketball frontier be stolen (pun definitely intended) by our machine overlords, or even removed entirely from major moments?

Maybe not. The craft and art of the jump ball have been passed down among officials and players alike for more than a century. This game-within-a-game has become one of the sport’s oldest and most iconic traditions, with flaws that only augment its charms. To many in this world, that’s worth holding on to even as the game evolves around it.

“It’s part of the game, always was,” Mauer says. “I hope they don’t get rid of things like that.”

Thanks to Taylor Snarr and Patrick McFarlane for research assistance.

Ben Dowsett is a freelance NBA writer based in Salt Lake City, with past work at ESPN, The Guardian, GQ, and elsewhere. He specializes in stories about tech, officiating, and the curious corners of the sports world.