NBA Watching Flopping?

The league is using this season as a case study trying to determine how often flopping occurs in a game. Then, there's the issue of whether or not a referee can tell the difference between a legitimate charging foul and when a player makes the contact look worse than it really is by flopping to the court. Often, they are easy to detect on the super slow-motion replays from television, but at game speed, differentiating can be tricky.

"They're really difficult to determine in real time. They're meant to fool an official," NBA executive vice president Stu Jackson said earlier this season in a meeting with reporters. "Are we going to be wrong more times than not? It's tough, but we're looking at it."

Manu Ginobili oversold his attempt to get Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki called for a charging foul in the third quarter of Game 5 Wednesday, according to teammates, opposing players, and frustrated emergency medical personnel who grudgingly carried off the Spurs shooting guard in a stretcher despite the fact that he was clearly still breathing. "We kept shaking his shoulder and telling him, 'Manu, wake up, we got the ball back,' but he just kept lying there for a good five minutes," said teammate Tony Parker, adding that Ginobili was unresponsive to loud shouts in his ear and showed no signs of movement except a slight smirk after Tim Duncan pried his right eyelid open. "I guess maybe he thought that if the ref saw that he was really still alive, he might reverse the call. It's too bad he had to miss the rest of the game when he was taken to the hospital." NBA analysts say are calling this incident the most extreme case of flopping since 1992, when Vlade Divac, who was hiding a razor in his wristband, surreptitiously sliced his supraorbital vein and bled to death after drawing minor contact with the Clippers' Danny Manning.