Is NBA ‘possession ball’ a case of foul play?

December 10, 2025 at 8:33 am

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. That has increasingly become NBA teams’ mindset when it comes to chasing extra possessions and the potential costs of doing so.

Let’s back up a bit. With a bit more than a quarter of the season complete and most teams on mini-hiatus for the next 10 days while the NBA Cup plays out, it’s a good time to exhale and take a look at some league-wide trends.

One notable shift that stands out is that fouls and free-throw attempts have both sharply increased from a year ago. While this can change over the course of a season as both players and officials react to each other — most notably in the “no paint fouls” era in the second half of the 2023-24 season — I suspect this one is likely to stick around, because it’s driven by bigger stylistic changes that we’re seeing league-wide.

First, the data on fouls. League-wide free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt are up by 14.8 percent from a year ago; league-wide fouls per 100 possessions are up 13.4 percent. That comes in the wake of a flat half-decade-long trendline in the post-COVID-19 era:

The 2022-23 season stands out as something of an outlier, and 2023-24 was trending the same way before an abrupt reduction in fouls and free throws after the All-Star break. Still, even those seasons pale beside what we’ve seen in 2025-26. To have double-digit percent increases in foul rates in one season is a fairly extreme shift.

Pedants will note that pace is also up this year, which would affect personal fouls per game, but it’s only a 1.2 percent difference, and the foul rate has increased more than 10 times that amount. That isn’t the cause here.

What is? The first instinct is to blame the refs somehow, but that quickly leads to dead ends. I’ve been in a lot of arenas in the last month, and nobody is really talking about changes in the officiating this year. (As opposed to, say, March 2024, when everyone was talking about it). To my own eyes, I haven’t seen play types officiated differently than previous years. And anecdotally, post-game officiating rants have been an uncommon sight.

A more possible boogeyman would be the Oklahoma City Thunder, who nearly set a record for defensive efficiency last season while finishing 26th in opponent free-throw rate. The team that finished just behind them in the defensive stats, the Orlando Magic, was 29th in opponent free throws.

What those two teams mastered was “possession-ball,” something I wrote about earlier this year as teams have leaned into it more. Both Oklahoma City and Orlando forced heaps of turnovers and controlled the boards, limiting opponent field-goal attempts.

The flip-side of that is the Houston Rockets’ approach, which is to go nuts on the offensive glass and attempt to win the possession battle that way. This is basically a new paradigm in the league, replacing the previous 2010s orthodoxy of limiting rebounding attempts to avoid surrendering transition. This more aggressive approach has increased offensive rebound rates across the league. (Well, except in Milwaukee.)

Meanwhile, teams have also leaned into using ball pressure to generate more turnovers — again, I discussed this at length earlier in the season. That’s a direct response to both the ridiculous efficiency some modern offenses have achieved if they’re just allowed to play pop-a-shot … and, ironically, to the increased physicality allowed on the perimeter since the middle of the 2023-24 season.

Perhaps as a reaction to the success of teams like Thunder, Magic and Rockets, both offensive rebounds and turnovers are way up this year. The league-wide offensive rebound rate this season is 26.2 percent, and the league-wide turnover rate is 13.0 percent. The rebound rate has seen an 8 percent jump just in the last two years and an 18 percent jump from the league’s low ebb of a 22.2 percent rebound rate in 2020-21. Meanwhile, the turnover rate of 13 percent hasn’t been exceeded in the last decade and is a 7.4 percent jump from last season.

Some individual teams have been wild outliers: Oklahoma City and the Phoenix Suns are turning teams over on more than 15 percent of their possessions, while Houston has an unthinkable 38 percent offensive rebound rate.

So, back to our omelette: Possession-ball isn’t possible without fouls, and often fouls on both sides. Increasing offensive rebound attacks also increases the number of contested rebounds, which adds to the number of loose-ball fouls in both directions. One sight that’s been especially common, however, is a ref on the baseline blowing their whistle, raising both arms and then pointing their fingers at the floor, in an exaggerated “stays here” motion after the defense fouls an opposing offensive rebounder.

For instance: Just try uprooting Steven Adams without getting a whistle. Watch as Denver’s Bruce Brown leans in with his full body weight and two arms, doing his best Sisyphus impersonation to roll this human boulder out of the way:

This happens nearly every game with Adams, whose 25.4 percent offensive rebound rate leads the league among players with at least 300 minutes played; the dude is drawing fouls and earning free throws without even touching the ball.

Of course, that’s only part of it. Putbacks, as a shot type, also tend to generate a lot more shooting fouls than jumpers, putting even more pressure on the league-wide foul rate.

The same applies to a lesser extent with ball pressure. Not only does it increase the risk of fouls 50 feet from the basket (in theory, at least, although the league has been reluctant to call all but the most egregious hand-checks), it also increases the possibility of offensive fouls from frazzled dribblers.

Which takes us to the next question: Are foul rates about to escalate even more? It’s a copycat league, and the copying seems to be working. As much as teams such as the Rockets have rediscovered the value of crashing the glass to their offenses, many are seeing the foul-turnover tradeoff seems to favor the defense.

It’s not just the Thunder. The Detroit Pistons, for example, have the league’s third-best defense despite the worst opponent free-throw rate; they are third, however, in opponent turnover rate at 14.6 percent and second in offensive rebound rate at 31.5 percent. Phoenix has been less extreme, but it’s another surprise team that has benefited in a big way from owning the possssion war despite a high foul rate. (The Thunder, I will note, have dialed back the fouling quite a bit in 2025-26; they’re now just awesome at everything).

Again, we’ve seen the ebbs of flows of league-wide trends pivot before; the NBA could decide to call the game differently, or other factors we can’t even conceive of yet could convince teams to tilt their focus in a different direction. Nonetheless, the possessions-and-fouls shift is one of the most notable stylistic changes we’ve seen in the league this season. Now the question, for the last three quarters of the season, is whether the trend only accelerates from here.

Comments

LakerTom says

December 10, 2025 at 8:33 am

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. That has increasingly become NBA teams’ mindset when it comes to chasing extra possessions and the potential costs of doing so.

Let’s back up a bit. With a bit more than a quarter of the season complete and most teams on mini-hiatus for the next 10 days while the NBA Cup plays out, it’s a good time to exhale and take a look at some league-wide trends.

One notable shift that stands out is that fouls and free-throw attempts have both sharply increased from a year ago. While this can change over the course of a season as both players and officials react to each other — most notably in the “no paint fouls” era in the second half of the 2023-24 season — I suspect this one is likely to stick around, because it’s driven by bigger stylistic changes that we’re seeing league-wide.

First, the data on fouls. League-wide free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt are up by 14.8 percent from a year ago; league-wide fouls per 100 possessions are up 13.4 percent. That comes in the wake of a flat half-decade-long trendline in the post-COVID-19 era:

The 2022-23 season stands out as something of an outlier, and 2023-24 was trending the same way before an abrupt reduction in fouls and free throws after the All-Star break. Still, even those seasons pale beside what we’ve seen in 2025-26. To have double-digit percent increases in foul rates in one season is a fairly extreme shift.

Pedants will note that pace is also up this year, which would affect personal fouls per game, but it’s only a 1.2 percent difference, and the foul rate has increased more than 10 times that amount. That isn’t the cause here.

What is? The first instinct is to blame the refs somehow, but that quickly leads to dead ends. I’ve been in a lot of arenas in the last month, and nobody is really talking about changes in the officiating this year. (As opposed to, say, March 2024, when everyone was talking about it). To my own eyes, I haven’t seen play types officiated differently than previous years. And anecdotally, post-game officiating rants have been an uncommon sight.

A more possible boogeyman would be the Oklahoma City Thunder, who nearly set a record for defensive efficiency last season while finishing 26th in opponent free-throw rate. The team that finished just behind them in the defensive stats, the Orlando Magic, was 29th in opponent free throws.

What those two teams mastered was “possession-ball,” something I wrote about earlier this year as teams have leaned into it more. Both Oklahoma City and Orlando forced heaps of turnovers and controlled the boards, limiting opponent field-goal attempts.

The flip-side of that is the Houston Rockets’ approach, which is to go nuts on the offensive glass and attempt to win the possession battle that way. This is basically a new paradigm in the league, replacing the previous 2010s orthodoxy of limiting rebounding attempts to avoid surrendering transition. This more aggressive approach has increased offensive rebound rates across the league. (Well, except in Milwaukee.)

Meanwhile, teams have also leaned into using ball pressure to generate more turnovers — again, I discussed this at length earlier in the season. That’s a direct response to both the ridiculous efficiency some modern offenses have achieved if they’re just allowed to play pop-a-shot … and, ironically, to the increased physicality allowed on the perimeter since the middle of the 2023-24 season.

Perhaps as a reaction to the success of teams like Thunder, Magic and Rockets, both offensive rebounds and turnovers are way up this year. The league-wide offensive rebound rate this season is 26.2 percent, and the league-wide turnover rate is 13.0 percent. The rebound rate has seen an 8 percent jump just in the last two years and an 18 percent jump from the league’s low ebb of a 22.2 percent rebound rate in 2020-21. Meanwhile, the turnover rate of 13 percent hasn’t been exceeded in the last decade and is a 7.4 percent jump from last season.

Some individual teams have been wild outliers: Oklahoma City and the Phoenix Suns are turning teams over on more than 15 percent of their possessions, while Houston has an unthinkable 38 percent offensive rebound rate.

So, back to our omelette: Possession-ball isn’t possible without fouls, and often fouls on both sides. Increasing offensive rebound attacks also increases the number of contested rebounds, which adds to the number of loose-ball fouls in both directions. One sight that’s been especially common, however, is a ref on the baseline blowing their whistle, raising both arms and then pointing their fingers at the floor, in an exaggerated “stays here” motion after the defense fouls an opposing offensive rebounder.

For instance: Just try uprooting Steven Adams without getting a whistle. Watch as Denver’s Bruce Brown leans in with his full body weight and two arms, doing his best Sisyphus impersonation to roll this human boulder out of the way:

This happens nearly every game with Adams, whose 25.4 percent offensive rebound rate leads the league among players with at least 300 minutes played; the dude is drawing fouls and earning free throws without even touching the ball.

Of course, that’s only part of it. Putbacks, as a shot type, also tend to generate a lot more shooting fouls than jumpers, putting even more pressure on the league-wide foul rate.

The same applies to a lesser extent with ball pressure. Not only does it increase the risk of fouls 50 feet from the basket (in theory, at least, although the league has been reluctant to call all but the most egregious hand-checks), it also increases the possibility of offensive fouls from frazzled dribblers.

Which takes us to the next question: Are foul rates about to escalate even more? It’s a copycat league, and the copying seems to be working. As much as teams such as the Rockets have rediscovered the value of crashing the glass to their offenses, many are seeing the foul-turnover tradeoff seems to favor the defense.

It’s not just the Thunder. The Detroit Pistons, for example, have the league’s third-best defense despite the worst opponent free-throw rate; they are third, however, in opponent turnover rate at 14.6 percent and second in offensive rebound rate at 31.5 percent. Phoenix has been less extreme, but it’s another surprise team that has benefited in a big way from owning the possssion war despite a high foul rate. (The Thunder, I will note, have dialed back the fouling quite a bit in 2025-26; they’re now just awesome at everything).

Again, we’ve seen the ebbs of flows of league-wide trends pivot before; the NBA could decide to call the game differently, or other factors we can’t even conceive of yet could convince teams to tilt their focus in a different direction. Nonetheless, the possessions-and-fouls shift is one of the most notable stylistic changes we’ve seen in the league this season. Now the question, for the last three quarters of the season, is whether the trend only accelerates from here.

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