To The Video Review

How long did the last 2.3 seconds of the first half of Sunday's WNBA game between Golden State and Connecticut take? 

Hint - it was longer than 2.3 seconds. 

If you said five minutes, you'd be wrong. If you said seven minutes, eight minutes, even nine minutes, you'd be wrong. No, the correct answer is 10 minutes. 

And that's just ridiculous. 

Why? Because the officials were reviewing whether or not there had been a foul on a three-point attempt by Golden State's Kate Martin. It was a judgement call by the refs, like a million others through the decades in which the sport of basketball has been played. 

In the new world of video review, in the name of "getting it right," this led to a huge delay as the officials poured over the replay to determine if there had been a foul. Keep in mind that the Sun were up by 16 at the time. 

TigerBlog has watched a great deal of the WNBA this summer. He enjoys the games more than he does the NBA games, which have become mostly three-point contests. He especially like the more, if you'll forgive him for using this term, "Princetonian" aspects of the women's game, with its emphasis on moving without the ball and finding the open person. 

He was one of the many who started to watch the league last year, when Caitlin Clark arrived. Now he has continued to watch, even with Clark hurt — partly because of Kaitlyn Chen and partly because of the games themselves. 

Chen is a Princeton alum who is the only three-time Ivy tournament Most Outstanding Player in any sport who went on to win an NCAA title last year with UConn as a grad student. She's now in the WNBA on the Valkyries, and you can see through the TV just how much joy she has to be around the game still. It's the same joy she brought every night as a Tiger. 

Because he's watched so many WNBA games, TB can tell you that the use of replay in the WNBA has gone way off the rails. Earlier in the game — or it might have been the Indiana-Chicago game that followed; there have been so many TB has lost track — there was a long review to see if the shot clock had expired before a foul was committed. 

It's a tough situation, with the idea of, yes, getting calls correct versus the way these replays completely destroy the rhythm of the game. There are too many of them and they take too long. 

And, perhaps worst of all, these long delays often happen on the kinds of plays that have little to no impact on the outcome of the game. The game has endured just fine with a missed call here and there. All games have.  

TigerBlog sees this through the eyes of a fan and through his role on the NCAA men's lacrosse rules committee. He was part of the committee when it first brought review to men's lacrosse, and he can say that there has been as much discussion about video review the last three years than any other subject (other than the face-off).

TB's approach during his time on the committee has always been to consider what rule you'd want in place in overtime of the NCAA championship game and work from there. So yes, you want to be able to use video to make sure that there is no asterisk next to the winner. 

The trickle down, though, is always inevitable. It goes from that — wanting to avoid any illegitimacy to your national champ — to looking for tiny microscopic evidence of something in the middle of the second quarter of a WNBA regular season game. 

Different sports have different challenges, of course. In sports where scoring is at a premium, such as hockey, soccer, and field hockey, calls at any time can be game-changing. 

That's why it doesn't bother TB as much to see delays in those sports, because of how big the impact of adding or deleting one scoring chance can be. In a perfect world, these reviews would be pretty quick, even though that's not usually the case. 

The other issue is judgement calls, like the foul at the end of the first half Sunday. It was a judgement call by the refs. Should that be reviewable? 

That opens a huge can of worms. You don't want to expand the number of replays there are, since they do shut down the game.

On the other hand, what are you supposed to tell the officials? You can see if the ball went out off of Team A but not call the foul that Team B obviously committed in the process? 

TB is sure he'll be having further conversations this coming year as replay in men's college lacrosse continues to evolve. 

As for the WNBA? 

More Kaitlyn Chen. Fewer replays.