Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert gave New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson a shove to the back during a preseason game this week, and the reigning NBA Finals MVP fell forward after taking the impact.
That was fine. Predictable, expected, understandable.
Thing is, Brunson continued to stumble — and that’s what the NBA is watching.
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The message from the league is simple: Stop the flop. While it’s certainly plausible that a chiseled, 7-foot-1, 258-pound man like Gobert could send someone 11 inches shorter and 68 pounds lighter like Brunson flying with a shove, the referee clearly felt in that moment that the Knicks star oversold the impact.
A technical foul for flopping was called. Brunson didn’t like it, but the NBA says those calls will be coming this season when the line between embellishment and flopping — a subjective line, to say the least — gets crossed.
“We’re seeing people say, ‘Oh, I’m so tired of the flopping,’” Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s senior vice president of referee development and training, said before preseason play started this fall. “There’s a real institutional distinction between embellishments — which we have allowed and are going to continue to allow, which is not secondary, is not theatrical, is not exaggerated — and flopping.
“Embellishment is saying, ‘Hey, I think something illegal took place here, and I’m trying to draw your attention to it.’ We did not want to rob our players of the passion or the ability to draw attention to something.”
The NBA always has officiating priorities — some called points of emphasis, others called areas of focus — going into a season. This season’s list includes clarity on off-arm push-offs by offensive players (or creating space illegally), what is legal freedom of movement on screens and proper closeouts on jump shots.
Referees have gone into training camps to give teams a taste of what’s happening, and the preseason games provide a more open look at the changes and how they’ll affect play.
“I believe NBA players are some of the best and quickest at adapting to the rule trends,” said James Jones, the former NBA player who is now an executive vice president overseeing basketball operations for the league. “I have no doubt players will adapt in a positive way and in a competitive way.”
The list of annual priorities isn’t put together randomly; it happens after countless meetings with stakeholders, competition committee members and more.
It all matters, and getting a better handle on flopping has been something everyone seems to want.
“For me, it’s a simple fix: Just don’t reward these non-basketball actions. That’s it,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “Those of us who have been in the sport long enough know what it is and what it isn’t. … We don’t teach flopping here. We don’t teach embellishment. We never have.”
Some coaches, such as the Boston Celtics’ Joe Mazzulla, have said the first 10 or 15 games of the regular season are the truest indicator of how changes in officiating will affect games. And it’s true that the league has called it a priority in the past to try to eliminate flopping; it assessed only four flops after postgame reviews in the entire 2025-26 season.
“The players see a rule, they figure out the boundaries of the rule and then they figure out a way to bend them more,” Jones said. “And that’s what makes our game and the competition great. It’s like this game of cat and mouse.”