The solution is to boycott the NBA.
As long as a lot of fans pay to watch the NBA, they will never change their ways.
I contact them regularly through email and they routinely respond back. If enough of us make a habit of this, they'll be forced to deal with it.
NBA coaching staffs need more challenges. One per quarter would greatly help. The "overturns" need to be kept track of and then the worst of the offenders need to be suspended and retrained. (Or perhaps a different career choice.)
The NBA has by far the worst officiating of any organized professional sport.
Agree, part of it may be short attention span of modern life due to tech (something like a cousin of laziness when it comes to keen observational power, affecting a fast game like basketball more than other sports), but more than that probably poor training and guidelines handed down from above.
There is no over-arching philosophy behind current NBA refereeing. There is only minutiae. There is only ticky tack. Ticky tack is winning over and over against game flow.
Refs are running around in fearing being criticized for no calls. What they should be taught instead by the NBA is to fear being guilty of making phantom calls. They should be graded as follows:
1. Minus one point for missing a foul that happened
2. Minus two points for making something up (calling a foul that didn't occur.)
Loose ball scrums are one of the pleasures of a basketball game. Modern day refs end the scrums with a whistle and then make something up. This is an egregious example of interfering in a contact sport in completely the wrong manner. In many scrums it is humanly impossible to tell who fouled who, and often there is just incidental contact, two players meeting ball at same time, etc... Eat your freaking whistle and let the play play out....let the players play out the action in the contact sport that basketball is.
Somehow I see the over control of basketball games, which is a fear-based approach to managing a game, as mirroring what's happening in modern society. Fear of this, fear of that. Fear everywhere...no wonder demagogues are so appealing these days. They are filling the void that fear has created.