From his seat behind the team bench, Ryan Lumpkin, a 26-year-old player development coach for the Wizards, could feel the eyeballs bearing down on him. It was last October, in the season opener, and Washington star Bradley Beal was whistled for a foul following a collision with Toronto’s OG Anunoby. Lumpkin could feel his heart rate spiking. “My Apple Watch,” he says, “was telling me something was up.”
Matt Reynolds knows the feeling. In the second quarter of Game 3 of Boston’s conference semifinals series against Milwaukee, Reynolds, a Celtics assistant, watched as a referee signaled a block on Marcus Smart—a call that, if it had gone the other way, would have meant the third foul on Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo. Charles Klask, a Nuggets assistant, winces when he recalls a regular-season game against the 76ers, when JaMychal Green rushed toward him, finger twirling—the universal sign to call for a coach’s challenge—because a reversal would mean a fourth foul for Joel Embiid. “Some of these are game-changing moments,” says Klask. “All you’re thinking is, .”
The coach’s challenge landed in the NBA rule book on a trial basis in 2019, and then permanently a year later. Inspired by the success of the NFL’s version, NBA coaches had pushed for it and, after five years of experimentation in the G League, won the right to use it. While it’s the head coach who signals for a review—that familiar finger twirl that triggers a neon-green light at the scorer’s table that leads to a trio of referees huddling around a monitor—each has someone they lean on. They are, simply, the challenge guys, anonymous assistants, unless your gaze happens upon a backbencher with his head buried in his laptop. They are the people you (unwittingly) cheer when a missed call gets overturned, the ones you (unknowingly) curse when a team refuses to challenge one. When an entire bench swivels on a close play, they are the midlevel staffers in polo shirts everyone is staring at. “Think of them like the long snapper,” says Raptors coach Nick Nurse. “Nobody knows who they are until they hike it over the quarterback’s head.”