Trae Young just got ejected for simply passing a ball to an official.
ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?? 
And Young is right. He recently said refs need to be held accountable with fines/suspensions. Now I kinda wonder if this was a conspiracy from the refs to eject Young since he made those comments recently too. It's becoming pathetic. Wish something could be done about it in the offseason. But given the Lebron incident against Boston, and all these countless technicals on the most ridiculous stuff (like simply clapping your hands to yourself) I think there'll be real discussions
I hope the players make this an emphasis in the CBA discussions
I hope the owners to do. be a united front in dealing with the officials union. Need to be able to remove awful officials
I'm thinking beyond that. They need to support refereeing at the grassroots more, encourage more people to take it up as a career, so that we increase the pool of quality referees, so we can drop these bad ones. I have a suspicion that as bad as these ones are, the ones waiting in the wings are even worse.
But in the meantime, I've been thinking of how to fix this issue of human error/bias. I really think that with technology the way it is now, it's possible that fans watching the game on TV will have access to many more angles and replays of calls that the refs have to do in real time, and so the errors become a lot more magnified. Then you also have players taking a leaf from soccer players' books and embellishing contact, flopping and otherwise trying to fool the referee. Then you have the likes of LeBum, Tatum, Trae etc. trying to influence the referees by constant chatting and complaining.
Maybe it's time to implement 3 rules:
- any chatting or arguing with the referee will be subject to a technical foul; (this fixes the issue of dissent and influencing on the court)
- there will be a FOURTH video referee watching the game with access to multiple camera angles. He has the authority to stop play and overrule the on court referees if after reviewing replays he feels a foul has been missed or a call has been made incorrectly; (this fixes the issue of incorrect calls because referee is unsighted/incompetent etc)
- each team gets two challenges a quarter. If they get it right they get their challenge back (this fixes the issue of bias)
Obviously the downside to my proposal is that the game will probably get a lot slower and stop-start as calls are reviewed and challenges are made. But would that be a worthwhile cost to pay to get calls 100% right? (Or maybe 99%, 100% seems optimistic 
)
I think if you want to start a grassroots movement to entice people to get into refereeing you’d need to do some community coaching on parents and high school kids not being complete buttholes to refs.
It’s a pretty thankless job. I used to ref a little a little bit, and actually liked it, but good lord pretty take sports/competition way too seriously.
That's really why I feel the people we have are the best available, because most people don't really want to be refs, they would rather be players so they can yell at refs
But obviously the standard has plenty of room for improvement. Investment needs to be made at the grassroots, from kids refereeing other kids in high school all the way through to college refs and then at the professional level. It's a thankless job, because they are the pinatas for everyone - teams, players, fans. The only time they know they did a good job is when they don't get noticed at all.
Rather than just get rid of the bad ones, which we should, I'd like to think we can try and improve the standard. But I'm not aware of any sport where people are happy with referees, or there's one good referee that was known to be good - other than in soccer, many years ago, there was an Italian referee named Pierluigi Collina, he refereed the 2002 World Cup final and he's now the Chairman of the FIFA Referees' Committee, but during the late 1990s and early 2000s he was so good that when he blew his whistle none of the players ever argued - and we all know how much soccer players love to argue calls. Fans from all teams loved him. I don't think we have a single referee in the NBA who is held in that esteem by players or fans.
And you have it right about parents...when it comes to yelling at refs, parents have it down to a fine art I think
