NBA Commissioner Adam Silver seems to be giving the Player's Association more autonomy than ever when it comes to formalizing league regulations. This is in comparison to Silver's predecessor David Stern, who lived up to his surname for how he ran the league for 30 years and assessed fines for what he defined as player and coach misconduct.
Silver is allowing a more democratic approach for the players to negotiate rule book changes, the player dress code, making political statements, and criticizing officials after games on their own player's hotline.
According to Mitch Lawrence of Sporting News, the hotline is something for the Player's Association to create for themselves on which they can offer their two cents about a referee. They can discuss how they feel about a referee who is presumably singling them out individually or as a team for violation or crucial missed calls during games. This is an additional amendment to the officials' Last Two Minutes reports of games and the names of the referees in the reports that will be now be coming in once a month. Therefore, players can complain about the referees all they want when they give the hotline a buzz.
The best way that a player can stay on a referee's good side when these reports come out is to hit the NBA's new version of the Hotline Bling to sing their praises after games.
