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.

The tactic has become controversial for the way it seems to subvert the point of the game. N.B.A. 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.