When physical contact is part of the sport, coaches often create different strategies to use it to their advantage. Especially when the opponets’ defense is known for their weakness and excessive use of the illegal contacts. In the NBA, physical contact rules have been changing through the years, especially in the last 30 years, or so.

To explain further, there are five type of fouls an NBA player can commit during an official NBA game. Thoseare, personal fouls, flagrant fouls, offensive fouls, loosel ball fouls , and technical fouls . These fouls usually are used to attractillegal contact from the opponent’s defender side, in order to get more points without tickingdown the playing clock.

However, as basketball is a physical-contact sport with many illegal contacts per game, sometimes a game could be stopped so many times that eventually won’t have any game flow. That’s why after a series of fouls, a player is going to be fouled out.

NBA: How many fouls does a player need to be fouled out?

As mentioned before there are five types of fouls during an official NBA game. For personal fouls, a player will make an illegal contact with an opposing player which means pushing, holding, obstructing, and lunging to interrupt an opponent’s progress. It will be penalized with a free throw to the fouled player if he was making a shot while being fouled, and there will be three, two, or one free throw if the shot was made or not.

A flagrant foul happens when a player commits a foul that results in an opponent injured.There are two different types of flagrant fouls,unnecessary collisions, which are penalized withloss of possession of the ball to the opponent’s hand and a free throw, andexcessive or unnecessary exposure, which results to be fouled out of the game, and fines forthe fouled player.

For the offensive foul, a player usually has the ball and makescharging and illegal screens.This results in theloss of possession of the ball to the opponent’s hand. As well as, when there’s an illegal contact by a player while fighting for a loose ball, which results in the opposing team taking possession of the ball or receivinga free throw. Usually, in an official NBA game which is 48 minutes long,after six fouls commited, the player will be fouled out and will have to stay out of the court. But the team can replace him in order to keep a five-on-five game.