Bubba Wells waited until Dennis Rodman had jogged across the center circle before grabbing him near his shoulders. Rodman tried to wriggle free as play continued around them, and the players grappled for a few seconds before a referee noticed and whistled a foul.

Wells walked away, chewing gum, smiling sheepishly.

It was Dec. 29, 1997, and the Dallas Mavericks had traveled to play the Chicago Bulls. Before the game, Don Nelson, the Mavericks’ coach, asked Wells, then a 23-year-old rookie, if he would be willing to help execute a curious new game plan: Nelson wanted to foul Rodman repeatedly, whether he had the ball or not, to send him to the free-throw line, where he was shooting just 38.6 percent.

“It wasn’t no big thing,” Wells said last week.

But in the years since, it has become one. Nelson was pleased with his experiment that night — even though Rodman made 9 of his 12 attempts from the line and the Mavericks lost their 12th straight game. Nelson used the tactic often, with Shaquille O’Neal becoming his most famous target, and it caught on around the league. After all this time, though, it may finally have crossed a line.

At an end?

The tactic has become controversial for the way it seems to subvert the point of the game. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has called the tactic Hack-a-Somebody — a nod to its original name, Hack-a-Shaq. Kiki Vandeweghe, the league’s vice president for basketball operations, calls the plays off-ball deliberate fouls. Whatever the fouls are called, Silver said last month that he hoped the league’s owners could come to an agreement over the coming weeks about how to outlaw the tactic before the 2016-17 season.

As the league sees it, things have gotten out of hand: There were 420 deliberate fouls away from the ball in the regular season, up from 179 in the 2014-15 season and 115 the season before that. The league is officially tired of it.

“It’s not unanimous, but there’s clearly an emerging consensus, both from the members of the competition committee and the owners, who we made a presentation to at last week’s meetings, that we need to address the situation,” Silver said. “Exactly what the new rule should be is still open for debate. I’m hoping that between now and when the owners next meet in July, we can create and form a consensus as to what the change in the rule should be.”

In the beginning

In 1997, though, it was a newfangled tool that caused some bewilderment and delight, and the local Chicago television commentators calling the game between the Mavericks and Bulls did not seem to know what to make of it.

“That’s holding on the defense,” the play-by-play announcer, Wayne Larrivee, said to his partner, Johnny Kerr, after puzzling over Wells’ initial foul. “That’s 15 yards, John.”

After Wells fouled Rodman a second time, the two players chuckled about it. After the third, Bulls coach Phil Jackson put his head down and laughed.

“Does anybody understand what’s going on here?” Kerr said on the broadcast.

Rodman’s patience eventually wore thin. After getting fouled a fourth time, he sank a free throw and stared right at Nelson, who smiled and offered him an apologetic shrug. The crowd was restless, too.

“Everyone was astonished to see what was going on,” said Tommy Nunez, a referee that night. “We understood the strategy, as refs, and so we don’t care. But it wasn’t pretty. It certainly wasn’t pretty.”

As Wells lined up to commit a fifth foul, Rodman tried to hide behind the baseline after inbounding the ball. When Rodman accepted his fate, Wells patted him on his backside.

“You could tell he was getting a little bothered by it,” Wells said of Rodman. “He looked at it like a slap in the face, what Nelly was doing.”

After the game, Rodman said of Nelson: “I respect him. But that was a crazy, crazy game plan.”

But to Nelson — and the scores of coaches who have used it since — the plan was perfectly rational. He said in an interview that he devised the move to use against teams “we didn’t have any business beating.” The Bulls that season eventually won 62 games; the Mavericks lost 62.

Chicago that season averaged 1.08 points per possession on offense. So if Rodman missed one shot each time Nelson put him on the foul line, it seemed, it would be a good deal for the Mavericks. On top of that, it would keep the ball out of the hands of players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, disrupting their overall rhythm and flow. That it backfired somewhat on the first night was all right with Nelson.

“I think it got his competitive juices flowing,” Nelson said of Rodman. “He ended up making them and spoiling the strategy. But it was a good strategy.”

Nelson was not discouraged. He drew glares from many players over the years and seemed to relish them. The tactic next garnered widespread attention in the 1999-2000 season. On Nov. 7 that season, against the Lakers in Los Angeles, Nelson had his players foul O’Neal repeatedly, whether or not he had the ball. O’Neal finished 10 of 23 from the foul line. Jackson, who had moved on to coach the Lakers, joked about Nelson after the game: “The guy’s on the rules committee, and he finds more ways to bend the rules than Richard Nixon did as president.”

The issue has provoked heated debate over the past few seasons. On one side are those who feel players and teams should not be pardoned for their horrid free-throw shooting. On the other are those who cannot stand to watch as a game comes to a halting stop when a player gets fouled over and over.

Even as the tactic’s proud creator, Nelson seemed to acknowledge that he had created something of a monster.

“I think, as a fan, if you weigh everything, the rule should be changed,” Nelson said. “It makes the game way too long.”