React excessively after a call by a referee does not go your way, and this season NBA players will immediately be tagged with a technical foul.
The league, it seems, is transforming itself from the National Basketball Association to No Bawling Allowed.
Call it what you want, though.
In these parts, where the Jazz face the Detroit Pistons in a preseason game tonight, there is a different nickname for the crackdown on complaining and demonstrative post-whistle emotion.
Or at least a certain Pistons villain has suggested one.
"It's just another 'Sheed Wallace rule," noted technical-collector Rasheed Wallace told The Detroit News after training camps around the league opened and word of the league's intent to tighten tolerance of the troublemakers spread earlier this month.
By whatever name, Wallace's disdain for the planned policing and other new NBA point-of-emphasis mandates — keep those shirttails tucked in, fellas, and be sure to have all layers of your warmups peeled off before checking in at the scorers' table or you won't be allowed to enter the game — is hardly a lone voice of dissent.
Even normally mild-mannered Minnesota Timberwolves Kevin Garnett has voiced extreme displeasure over the mandate to shut up and tone down gestures like hand-waving and jumping up and down.
"To the fact that you can't really speak to the refs, the refs don't want to hear it," the Associated Press quoted Garnett as saying. "That's almost like communism. That's like Castro."
Predictably, reaction from Utah's boy scouts is much more muted. Still, some with the goody-goody Jazz don't seem sure that legislating reaction so stringently is all good.
"It's an emotional thing when you feel you've been fouled, or you feel a call's gone against your way," said big man Jarron Collins, who isn't exactly a problem child. "They want us to control emotion a little bit — and it's tough to do, sometimes."
"I a little bit disagree with calling emotional stuff," forward Andrei Kirilenko added, "but definitely any kind of disrespect to the referee, any word that is addressed to the referee, I think is wrong."
Kirilenko, regarded as one of the league's most-sportsmanlike players, actually managed to have rescinded the one and only technical foul called against him in the NBA.
Perhaps that in part is because he has a healthy respect for the refs that many around the league do not.
"I'm telling you, I would never go for the referee to be disrespectful — because I understand them, and it's very unrespectful job to be a referee," Kirilenko said. "They're officials. They can (make) mistakes. They will make mistakes. Definitely. They're not perfect. Same as basketball player. We can't be perfect."
Yet that's no excuse, Kirilenko asserts, for dissing the refs.
Guard Gordan Giricek concurs.
"If you swear something, then it's a technical," Giricek said. "I think you cannot swear — because we are trying to get a better image for NBA players."
That seems to be a chief source for the league's intentions.
"They're trying to call things to change the image, the perception, the public has of athletes in general — and especially NBA athletes," Collins said.
Not to be forgotten is the fact that the venue for tonight's exhibition, the Palace of Auburn Hills, was the site of a still-fresh-in-everyone's-minds brawl involving both fans and players during a Pistons game against the Indiana Pacers.
So maybe it does make sense to stymie completely out-of-control complaining, Collins suggests.
"Sometimes the fans get riled up over bad calls, and sometimes the players magnify missed calls," he said, "and that makes for a hostile environment for referees."
Still, no one wants to completely suck emotion and expression out of the NBA product — which means the refs must walk something of a tightrope.
"I think one of the reasons our league took off, initially, was because the fans could identify with the players, because they could see their faces," Pistons coach Flip Saunders told the Detroit Free Press. "Hockey, you can't see their faces; baseball, you've got caps on; football, you've got helmets on. We're the only sport where you can go in a game and see the emotion of the game on their faces, and that's what people really identified with. I don't think we totally want to take that away."
"I don't think that's what the league is trying to do — but they certainly are cracking down on us," Jazz forward Matt Harpring said. "So we have to learn how they're going to call it, just like we learned other rules in the past that they put in on us."
Like the rest of the league, Jazz players plan to wait to see if the quick whistles really continue all season long — and just what they can get away with.
"That's where it becomes a gray area," Collins said. "You're talking about individual refs tolerating what they deem excessive, and 'What is excessive?' ... It's kind of like that old saying, 'They'll know it when they see it.'
"We'll see," Collins added, "if they're able to maintain those 'points of emphasis' throughout the year. Historically, not."
This much, though, seems certain: No whining a la Rasheed Wallace will be tolerated.
Any question in that regard was answered when the league recently showed Jazz players a videotape of the sort of behavior that unquestionably will cost them a technical.
Said Collins: "He (Wallace) was on the tape, let's put it that way."
NBA preseason
Utah (1-1) at
Detroit (2-1)
Today, 5:30 p.m.
The Palace of Auburn Hills
TV: None
Radio: 1320AM
E-mail: tbuckley@desnews.com