This Mic’d Up Ref’s Explanation Of A Foul Is One Of Many Great Parts Of The TBT Basketball Tournament

The Basketball Tournament — or TBT as it’s known to its friends — has been all over ESPN airwaves in the last few days. The daily fantasy sports tournaments have been a fun research exercise. The Elam ending has made for a ton of exciting endings to games. The TBT has overall been an enjoyable viewing experience, especially relative to our sports-deprived times.

But one thing that harkens back to my dearly departed XFL is the mic’d up players and coaches. There’s less access overall than in Vince McMahon’s defunded football league but there’s still a ton more than the other pro leagues. And no clip sums up that access better than this one from today’s game between the Men of Mackey and Boeheim’s Army. Here you’ll see the ref calmly and respectfully lay out why Mackey’s Isaac Haas was called for a common foul:

Ref did a great job explaining this foul to Isaac Haas 👏 pic.twitter.com/v8QZA375c2

— TBT (@thetournament) July 7, 2020

I love the NBA and am as excited for it to (hopefully) be back in a few weeks as anyone. But I’d kill to have these kind of exchanges compared to the dramatic You’ve Got Served dramatic duels between player and ref in the NBA.

In the NBA, we don’t fully understand why Chris Paul is so perpetually butthurt at a referee. We don’t see the ref’s explanation. We don’t see what gets CP3 from heated to putting his arm around the ref’s waist like he just accepted a promposal. There’s a cloak and dagger to the whole exercise with a lot of dramatiics in between.

But in TBT, much like the tournament itself, it’s all pure and threadbare. They’ll split $1 million amongst the winners but the majority of these dudes are there for the love of the game. I’m sure the same for the refs. That little bit of mic’d up candor may not keep someone who stupidly bet $1,000 on Men of Mackey from throwing their remote through the TV. But that little exchange is a reminder that there are things the NBA can, and should, try to improve upon when they get their turn in the bubble.

Or it’ll be equally contentious between players and refs and we’ll all have to sit there in a silent, fanless arena listening to it like Jesse Pinkman during that iconic Breaking Bad scene. Either/or.