A New Look at Fouls

Net Fouls and Foul On-Off

Jalen Brunson complaining to the ref after being called for a flopping technical early in the 2024-25 season.

Rule 6 in James Naismith’s Original 13 Rules of Basketball: “No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed.” From the jump, fouls have been subjective, depending on the “judge of the men” (Rule 10), and smart players have always figured out ways to take advantage.

Fouls have been an especially hot topic throughout the last year, dating back to the start of 2024. Coming out of that year’s All-Star game, there was a noticeable difference in the way referees officiated games. As the Athletic reported,

“During the 2023-24 season, league executives received feedback that offensive players were having too many advantages in the way the game was being officiated. The league responded midseason, hoping to bring more balance and provide less of an advantage to offensive players.”

That meant allowing more physicality on defense and trying to limit “foul baiting”, an attempt by the offensive player to trick referees into calling a foul by launching themselves into the defender, whipping their head back after getting brushed on the arm, or jumping backwards like they just got run into by a tank.

A season and a half later, things haven’t really changed. 55% of NBA players who responded to last week’s Athletic poll still believe the league is too slanted toward the offense, with one player complaining “it’s soft. This is anonymous, right? I think the league is soft.”¹

Surprisingly, only 3% of respondents answered that the officiating is “inconsistent”, or player-biased, given how much of the media coverage focuses on certain, star players’ ability to draw fouls others can’t get. One respondent in this camp did say, “If you’re not known, OK, you can get hit. But if you’re (going against) Steph or LeBron, you can’t get that physical”, while another (presumably) sighed, that’s just “the way it works.”

Given how it all works, I wondered, which players benefit the most from how the game is officiated?

Foul Merchants

To start off, we can simply look at the number of fouls² a player draws³:

Welp, there are your 2025 MVP finalists. Giannis drew 50 more fouls than any other player this season, and nearly 100 more than any non-MVP contender. That’s seven per game, more than the six-foul limit, meaning Giannis basically fouls out his primary defender every game. While Giannis can exaggerate like any other player, most agree he takes a lot of legitimate fouls. I mean what else are you supposed to do with this?⁴

Where the debate centers is with the guards, namely, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Brunson, who are tied for second in the league with 5.86 whistles drawn per game. In the regular season SGA, notoriously, made ~100 more free throws than anyone else, getting 25% of his league leading 32 points per game from the charity stripe.⁵ The notorious part comes from the fact that many of these free shots came because SGA is good at bending the rule book and getting officials to call fouls that weren’t really there. Watch how Evan Mobley, Anthony Edwards, and Russell Westbrook actively try to back off of Shai, and yet still get called for the foul:

Meanwhile, through the first five games of the playoffs, Brunson has already drawn a ridiculous 47 fouls. That’s nearly 10 a game! According to Owen Phillips at the F5, he fell down looking for a foul 12 times in Game 2 alone. While SGA got most of the attention in the regular season due on his MVP-contender-status, Brunson was practicing his foul baiting too. Watch him back into Philly defenders, essentially giving them an uppercut with the crown of his head, and get to go to the free throw line as a result.

This conversation has been had and re-had, by members of the media (33:40), coaches, players (42:50), and even the commissioner, so I won’t dwell too long. Instead, I want to look deeper into the numbers, in a way I haven’t seen in the discourse, to get back to my question of who benefits the most from the way the game is officiated in 2025.

Net Fouls

Drawing fouls is one way to benefit from the whistle, but the other, of course, is to not be called for infractions yourself. Perhaps no one is better at defending without getting the referee to react than Jimmy Butler. He committed just 0.9 fouls per game this regular season, fewest among players who averaged 30 or more minutes.

After he was traded from the Heat to the Warriors in early February, Jimmy completely reversed the profile for his new team. At the time of the deal, the Warriors were in the bottom half of teams in allowing opponent free throws; with Butler, the Warriors are top five. Meanwhile, the team made just 15 free throws per game, dead last in the NBA, before the trade; since, they are first with more than 20.⁶

We can summarize a turnaround like this in what I’m calling net fouls.

Net fouls = Fouls Committed - Fouls Drawn
(a negative number indicates a player or team is winning the foul battle)

With his unmatched propensity for drawing fouls, Giannis tops the net fouls list, but there’s Jimmy, right behind with a balance of high draw rate and low commit rate.

So these are the players who benefit the most from officiating, individually. But, basketball is a team game, and certain players help their teammates win the overall, team-level foul game.

Foul On-Off

On-Off stats compare the numbers a team produces when a given player is on the court playing vs off the court sitting on the bench. For instance, the Nuggets score 128.3 points (per 100 possessions) when Nikola Jokić is on the court vs 105.9 when he is off (per Cleaning the Glass), giving Jokić a (league leading) +22.4 on-off offensive rating.

We can look at on-off splits for net fouls as well, to see which players have the biggest impact on the overall foul battle.

The first thing to note is groupings of players on the same team. The Nuggets have Aaron Gordon, Nikola Jokić, and Christian Braun all in the top six and Jamal Murray at 15th. The Knicks (Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, Karl Anthony-Towns) and Warriors (Jimmy Butler, Brandin Podziemski) each have multiple players in the top 10 as well. These players often share the court, and thus the “on” minutes, so it makes sense that their on-off numbers are similar.

The Nuggets trio is an interesting case study. When any of Jokić, Gordon, and Braun are on the court, the Nuggets get ~3 more fouls going their way. Why is that? Well, Jokić sets the other two up, a lot: Jokić —> Braun is the number two assist combo in the NBA per PBP Stats, and the best part of Gordon’s game comes from lurking on the baseline waiting for the lob out of the Jokić-Murray pick and roll.⁷ A lot of those set-up passes result in fouls, as defenders have to scramble back from doubling Jokić but get there a touch to late to stop Braun or Gordon or whoever else without fouling.

If we counted these, forget about 30-20-20, we could be looking to 30-30-30 from the guy.

What’s also interesting is who’s missing from the on-off rankings. Butler, Jokić, and Brunson, all top 10 in individual net fouls, stay in the top 10 in on-off. Giannis, Paolo Banchero, Kevin Durant, Trae Young, Damian Lillard, and Anthony Davis are all still in the top 15% of players in on-off as well. But Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drops from 5th in individual net fouls to 294th in on-off. In fact, no Thunder starter even cracks the top 150.

On the season, the Thunder were whistled for 19.9 fouls per game, sixth most in the association. Meanwhile, as a team, OKC drew just 18.1, resulting in a team net rate of +1.8. That is last in the NBA. While people can and do quibble about the nature of the fouls Shai draws, it’s tough to argue he and his team get the benefit of the whistle with numbers like these. Shai may be a foul merchant, but maybe the officials just need to call something on the Thunder’s opponent, and Shai is usually the one with the ball driving into contact.

Finally, if we loosen the games played restriction a bit, a couple of bigs jump to the top of the on-off list, namely Victor Wembanyama and Kristaps Porzingis. While we’ve been focusing more on the fouls drawn side of the net equation so far, a lot of the Alien’s and Unicorn’s performance comes from defending without fouling. Given their Mrs. Incredible style wingspans, when these guys close out on a jump shot, they can do it without needing to get as close to the shooters, and therefore are less likely to undercut and foul. Meanwhile in the paint, these two fearsome rim protectors often deter teams from even trying to drive, eliminating the possibility of a foul at all.

Overall, the beneficiaries of fouls are about who we’d expect based on the media discussion. It is true that the best players in the league (especially SGA and Brunson) draw more fouls. It is true that Jimmy Butler is elite in not fouling. But the way these players win the foul battle, for themselves and their teammates, is nuanced.

Bonus: On-Off by Ref

After going through every foul called this regular season and examining which players benefit the most, I was curious about the differences amongst referees. Which refs call more or fewer fouls on certain players?

Well, we can look. There’s a few subtractions of subtractions going on here, but to simplify, the lower the “Ref Difference” the more that player is helped by that referee, relative to their average with all referees. A higher “Ref Difference” means that referee hurts a player more than the average ref.

One more note. The NBA aims to spread out officials across teams to avoid consistant bias, so the sample sizes are small. Nevertheless, here are the player : ref combos, with at least 3 games together, that are most beneficial to the players:

And the most harmful:⁸

For what it’s worth, Wright did actually officiate Knicks-Pistons Game 3. Brunson drew his typical 10 fouls that game, and Wright called three of them, but he also called Brunson on two of his three fouls committed for a net -1.

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1. One of the voters for balance shamelessly admitted, “I’m a foul baiter myself, but I think it’s in a good spot.”

2. Minimum 50 games played, for this and all following charts.

3. The numbers in this post differ slightly from officially reported foul numbers because I have excluded (a relatively small number of) miscellaneous fouls that depend more on the situation than the player. Examples include take fouls, technical fouls, defensive three-seconds, etc.

4. Thank you to Danny Ball for all the awesome video work!

5. It should be noted, SGA would still lead the league in scoring if you took away everyone’s free throws.

6. Most of this is driven by the increase in free throw attempts (from 20 to 25) but the Warriors’ free throw percentage also increased by 12 p.p. since Jimmy joined, which is probably more of a happy coincidence.

7. Or last second heaves from Jokić that turn out to be airballs that turn out to be buzzer beating dunks.

8. If you were curious, Scott Foster worked one Chris Paul game this year. Paul was not caleld for any fouls in 25 minutes.