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It's one of the dumbest basketball ideas ever.

And yet, the NBA is experimenting with it in the D-is-for-dumb League.

Let's run up on it with a couple of questions: What is the worst part of the game, the part of the game you loathe the most? Would it have anything to do with what starts with an r and ends with an s and has e-f-e-r-e-e in between?

Yes, yes it does.

Does it make any sense to give the game over to more of what you don't like?

No, no it does not.

Basketball, especially NBA basketball, is a beautiful game. It's fluid, it's athletic, it's acrobatic, it's eye-popping, it's riveting, it's graceful, it's poetic.

It's also impossible to officiate.

The players are so big, the action so fast, the contact pretty much unavoidable. Situations arise that are not always what they seem and sometimes they are exactly what they seem. Getting both sides of that equation correct is challenging. Humans do not have lasers for eyeballs. They have eyeballs for eyeballs. Even more crucial, there are judgment calls on every trip, many of them difficult, some of them missed.

And somehow, it's OK.

Let's go to Secaucus for a ruling on that.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's OK.

Comparing NBA refs to college officials, on the whole, makes you appreciate the NBA guys a thousand times over. Not all of them are great, but almost all of them are better than the guys at the lower levels. And usually, that has more to do with the aforementioned judgment than it does the aforementioned eyesight.

If you and I had five bucks for every time a whistle were blown on account of what a mistaken ref anticipates is going to happen, rather than what actually does, or on a play of insignificance, a play that had no real impact on the game, and only on padding a ref's desire to be a part of the action, we'd have enough Benjamins to wallpaper every D-League locker room from Austin to Reno to Sioux Falls to Fort Wayne to Erie to Westchester to Grand Rapids to Springfield to Salt Lake City. If every call in every game — college or pro, NBA or D League — were made by the book, every bit of contact were whistled, every tiny infraction enforced, basketball would reach a point of being unwatchable.

That's why a ref's wisdom is so important, knowing what to call, what to let slide.

Free throws are a necessary evil. There must be some penalty for slapping, smacking and shoving, some recompense for a player having his shot altered not by proper defense but by illegal contact. That's understood.

But is there anything that bogs a game down more than a symphony of whistles and a parade of players to the foul line? Better to have a few missed calls than to have refs too eager to get involved.

Which brings us back to the NBA/D League's dumb idea.

Starting in a couple of weeks, it will test the notion of bringing more of what we all hate into the picture and onto the court. In nine upcoming games, the league will increase officiating crews from the now standard number of three to four- and five-person outfits. Four-person crews were tried during the Jazz's Summer League in July here in Salt Lake. The NBA wants to collect more data and discover whether adding more eyes and whistles will affect the game.

It will all right, but in a negative way.

Call it ref proliferation.

There are a few different ways of looking at this: 1) The more officials that get involved, the less individual accountability there will be because the responsibility of making calls will fall to someone else; 2) The more sets of eyes, the more referees on the floor, the better the game will be called and fewer calls will be missed; 3) The more times the whistle blows, the more the flow of games will be interrupted, the more fouls will be called, the more players will foul out, the more free throws will be attempted, the less entertaining the games will become.

That last one is the most probable.

No problem with the league, at least in spirit, trying to improve the game. But if it really wants better refereeing, it will wipe out the star system, the system that allows the game's biggest talents more leeway than the rank-and-file. Just call the games straight up, the same for everyone.

Generally speaking, though, the last thing basketball needs is increased stoppages of play.

Contrary to the cliché, players would not adjust, neither would the folks buying the tickets. More eyeballs on the floor leave room for more bad judgment and more disqualification and more dissatisfaction.

Who wants that?

Not the players, not the coaches, not the fans.

Give them and everyone the flawed poetry, then, the enjoyment of the beauty of the game, the flow, not the unhappy hammer of technical justice more referees would be sure to swing.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on the Zone Sports Network, 97.5 FM and 1280 AM. Twitter: @GordonMonson.