Despite all of the Indiana Pacers fast breaks, rule change won’t have a big impact

The NBA is expected to change the clear path rules, but the impact will be minimal on the Pacers and the rest of the league.

As Adrian Wojnarowski also reported today, it is expected that the NBA will change the clear path foul rules — along with a few others — to at least punish teams for taking transition scoring opportunities away. While the changes are needed, the impact on games will be minimal for the Indiana Pacers and the rest of the NBA.

More on specifically how that affects the Pacers here in a moment, but this news was expected as the Fastbreak Breakfast podcast talked with NBA referee Monty McCutchen earlier in the week and discussed a number of refereeing topics.

One of those talked about on the podcast was the clear path rule and McCutchen revealed the league was looking to simplify the rule.

Also on the podcast, McCutchen commented on how an “advantage” rule, similar to what soccer (and international basketball) uses, would affect the game. While playing an advantage could help create more transition and fast break opportunities, there could be frustrations caused by the offense playing on but then losing the ball out of bounds immediately afterward.

He jokes that for officials, “the problem with your rope is it can become a noose very quickly.”

But enough with the gallows humor. Let’s say the NBA changes the rules beyond what is proposed and allows players to try to play through some contact and get easy buckets in transition. Would that help out Victor Oladipo and the Pacers?

Transition and fast break scoring are big for Indiana. The Pacers were 9th in the NBA in transition plays, with a total of 1,400 according to NBA.com, and Indiana gets 14 percent of their points on fast breaks, the fourth-most in the NBA. But they were around league average as far as the times they got free throws (14 percent) or shooting fouls (10.9 percent) from those possessions.

Despite the nature of the way the Pacers play, any rule changes, real or hypothetical, aren’t likely to have a major impact on gameplay.

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The only place I found any stats on clear path fouls says the Pacers didn’t have any called in their favor. This reminds you of how rare those fouls are even called. On average, NBA teams only saw 1.4 of them called during the season.

Even if the Pacers saw 3-4 called over the season as the top clear path foul drawing teams did, that’s headly enough to consider the impact. The clear path foul is rarely called and even with the expected rule changes, it doesn’t appear Indiana would see a significant difference. Even if the NBA played an advantage rule like soccer, the numbers say the effect would be minimal for teams.

But refining the rule is still a good thing. Instead of the officials going to the monitors to check exactly where players were all the time.

Hopefully, these changes allow them to simply make the call on the floor after a short huddle to get their ducks in a row.

Making the games run smoother is a good enough reason to change the rule, but don’t expect it to make create a significant about of points for the Pacers or anyone else.