Sports: 2008 NBA Playoffs

[WorldB3]

There was absolutely no consistency with the calls at all.

Seems like its been consistent enough to get Stern his desired final of Lakers vs Celtics.

[paul secor]

NBA - Fines will be imposed for clear cases of flopping

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3416579

Good thing Vlade Divac and Karl Malone are retired. If they were still around, they might not make enough to cover the fines for all of their flops.

[paul secor]

Rasheed better watch himself. The refs will be looking for him - even more so than usual. And he's usually not a hard guy to find.

[Aggie87]

Rasheed better watch himself. The refs will be looking for him - even more so than usual. And he's usually not a hard guy to find.

Plus, he's got 6 Techs now. One more and he is suspended for a game.

[BruceW]

There was absolutely no consistency with the calls at all.

Seems like its been consistent enough to get Stern his desired final of Lakers vs Celtics.

I hate to say this but it really looks that way. There was so much talk about Lakers vs. Celtics and everything that is happening is leading to that. And of course David S. will be standing courtside with that great big smile on his face. (as the money rolls in) Cah-Ching.

[Soulstation1]

Ya'll know stern pulls in 20 million per season

That's why i will be the next nba commish

[Free For All]

[Aggie87]

Congrats to Nojjy and the other Lakers fans on the board. Kobe almost single handedly won the game tonight. Good luck in the Finals.

Alot of things went against the Spurs in this series (36 hr turnaround from the previous series, sleeping on grounded planes, Ginobili's injuries, and questionable calls in the previous game) that affected the outcome, but I think overall the Lakers were the better team in this series and deserve to move on.

[Noj]

Thanks Agg. The Spurs are a tough team to hate, I really appreciate their professionalism in the interviews and their refusal to make excuses despite having a lot of excuses. Though SS1 would greatly disagree, they're all class. When they're not playing against the Lakers, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker are two of my favorite players to watch.

[Aggie87]

Good article IMO from Steven Aschburner at SI.com today:

Five wrongs and NBA still can't get it right in Fisher-Barry no-call

With the benefit of instant replay, the NBA admitted the other day that it appears a foul should have been called on Lakers guard Derek Fisher for banging into San Antonio's Brent Barry at the end of Game 4 in the Western Conference finals.

Taking that to the next illogical step -- logic has almost nothing to do with the NBA's approach to fouls, officiating, human error and videotape -- the benefit of instant replay reveals that the Lakers' 100-92 victory in Game 5 Thursday night merely unknotted a best-of-seven series that had been tied 2-2. In other words, because Barry should have gone to the line with the opportunity to tie or win Tuesday's game, either in regulation or overtime, the Spurs should still be alive and going home for Game 6.

While it was at it, the NBA announced that, yes, Michael Jordan did shove Utah's Bryon Russell in a clear offensive foul before he hit The Shot that produced The Pose in the 1998 Finals clincher in Salt Lake City. The benefit of instant replay also showed that there was, in fact, a second shooter behind the wooden fence on the grassy knoll in Dallas on that eventful day in 1963. And let's see, oh yeah, the league now believes that Mrs. O'Leary's clumsy old cow, in kicking over that lantern in that barn back in 1871, should have been whistled for a flagrant 2 foul rather than a flagrant 1.

Gee, uh, sorry, Chicago.

Sorry in advance, too, to the Detroit Pistons and the Boston Celtics and even the Lakers, should similar mistakes mar what's left of the Eastern Conference finals or any part of the 2008 Finals.

The manner in which the NBA handled the Fisher/Barry non-call from Tuesday, when it happened and ever since, was and is wrong on so many levels, it almost defies description. Although I will settle for one that the inimitable Charles Barkley offered prior to tipoff Thursday: Asinine.

Asinine, specifically, that the NBA felt moved 24 hours after the play in question to issue a statement acknowledging that its referees were wrong in not calling Fisher for a foul. What good possibly was going to come from that? The Spurs and their fans weren't going to feel any better -- and, in fact, might feel worse -- knowing that a blown call had possibly cost their team a chance to defend its 2007 championship. Especially since most of the 18,797 in attendance and the millions watching at home knew it was a blown call the instant it happened.

Verifying it, without offering any redress or remedy, is straight out of the "Wound, we'd like to introduce you to salt'' etiquette manual. "Fessin' Up for Messin' Up'' might make for a swell country-western song, but it is no sort of answer here.

Neither is the casual explanation -- in what was believed to be an all-time first -- that referees do, in fact, call games differently according to the clock or the calendar. NBA spokesman Brian McIntyre said that the three-man crew of Joey Crawford, Joe Forte and Mark Wunderlich was heeding a league guideline for dialing back their whistles according to the situation.

"There is an explanation in the rule book,'' McIntyre, a longtime league exec, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, "that there are times during games when the degree of certainty necessary to determine a foul involving physical contact is higher. That comes during impact time when the intensity has risen, especially at the end of the game. In other words, if you're going to call something then, be certain.''

As opposed to the rest of the time, of course, when it's OK to guess, play a hunch or flip a coin.

The NBA has spent years, nay, decades stonewalling on precisely these sorts of issues. Fouls and non-fouls, we've been told, are defined entirely by the officials in the moment and only occur when the guys with the whistles say they do (pretty existential, if you stop and ponder it). Judgment calls are not reviewable -- hardly anything is, although the Hawks and the Heat had an extremely odd do-over of 51.9 seconds in March because some Atlanta scorekeeper goofed back in December.

Furthermore, referees do not have to make themselves available to explain their decisions or even to provide a rules interpretation, if they don't want to. And their errors, we constantly are reminded, are part of the human element of the game, which is the same thing baseball traditionalists say these days about botched home run calls and fair-foul confusion.

Meanwhile, every shaky or swallowed whistle gets seen from three different angles by TV viewers, and put to a vote by the three-man broadcast crews planted at courtside. When appropriate and available, a clock can be anchored at the bottom of the screen to provide incontrovertible proof that a play allegedly run in less than 5.1 seconds actually took at least 5.2 seconds and was only made possible by a game clock that stuck twice on 4.8 seconds. That was the screw-up that handed Detroit a three-point field goal at the end of the third quarter in Game 2 of its Eastern Conference semifinals against Orlando.

That one, too, was not reviewable, never was explained by the referees on the court that night and never was fixed (however that might have been done) fixed. The Magic, their followers and people who value accuracy and fairness were met with a collective NBA shrug and the empty reassurances that, y'know, stuff happens and these things eventually even out.

Same with San Antonio folks, who can forever access the official play-by-play of Tuesday's Game 5 that simply reads: "Walton substitution replaced by Odom, 0:02 . . . Barry 3pt shot: missed, 0:01 . . . Team rebound, 0:00.'' You would think that, after its unusual admission of error, the league would parenthetically insert "(Fisher foul not called)'' at that 0:01 mark.

So, in the spirit of the NBA, let's review: The refs were wrong to not call Fisher's foul. The league was wrong to acknowledge the gaffe a day later while doing nothing to fix it or prevent future ones. The league also was wrong for fostering, to the point of a rule or a guideline in the NBA Big Book of Officiating, the suspicion that context dictates contact, rather than the other way around.

Referees and the NBA forever have claimed that a foul is a foul is a foul, whether in the first minute of Nets-Nuggets game in November or the last seconds of Game 7 of the Finals. In September 2006, I stood in front of a banquet hall full of referees, as part of a media panel in Chicago, sharing perceptions with their group, and heard the officials lament the public notion that they tweak their tweets for any reasons whatsoever.

To which I now say: If consistency of calls within any given set of refs is the ideal -- the lofty standard that allows the players and the coaches to adjust as each game plays out -- then altering the definition of a foul according to the clock, the score, the month or the series is the worst sort of unreliability. Might as well give Tim Donaghy his whistle back and add "`the Vegas line'' to the above list of variables.

By my count, that's three wrongs so far from this one play. Here is a fourth: Some veteran NBA observers, including the TNT gang, blamed Barry for not ``selling'' the foul on Fisher's bump. The Spurs shooting guard made a fatal mistake, they said, of trying to slip around the contact, even putting the ball on the floor for a dribble before he hoisted a feeble shot. He should have leaped straight into Fisher -- without any intention of getting off a viable field-goal attempt -- to accentuate the hit and the harm.

That's all part of the NBA experience, too, to the point that shooters learn to flail their arms or legs to increase contact and the likelihood of "and-one'' calls. Meanwhile, the league is so sick of theatrics such as defensive flopping to win block/charge decisions that it might nail transgressors with escalating fines next season. So which is it: More acting or less acting?

The big, honking fifth wrong is the league's stance on -- really, its resistance to -- instant replay. Fearful that it might wind up drinking out of a fire hose of second-guessing and blown decisions, the NBA instead has tiptoed in the direction of the videotape. First it was end-of-quarter plays to judge only the release of the ball. Then it was on flagrant 2 fouls, to double-check the severity. Next, who knows? Most likely, any increase in the use of the readily available technology will be incremental and timid. There's your real human element, right there.

A better answer? Maybe a challenge system, as mentioned recently here by SI.com's Ian Thomsen, that gives head coaches some control (and risk) in seeking an electronic review of a heated play. Maybe referee discretion, as long as the league stays more focused on getting things right than grading and docking its whistle-blowers for overturned calls. Maybe some hybrid solution or an alternative the competition committee hasn't heard of yet.

The NBA made its bones over the last 25 years by being bold, by taking initiative on things other leagues saw as breakthroughs. It worked, and even honed, the cutting edge in areas such as marketing, minority hiring and the merging of pop culture and sports. Yet it has fallen behind the behemoth NFL and the Mom-and-Pop NHL in trusting instant replays, and it even lags the tradition-bound national pastime in accessibility and accountability of its game officials. It uses technology, all right, but rather than fix a bad call, it gives us a miked-up head coach telling his guys, "We're in the bonus now.''

Whatever the NBA lands on, assuming it does something besides blink, has to be better than the "Oh, by the way...'' explanation it offered this week on Fisher/Barry. That was the worst sort of morning-after hangover, a misguided attempt at transparency that proved as flimsy as Saran Wrap.

Get it right first, get it right second, get it right -- naked eyeballs or LCD monitor -- every possible time.

Edited May 31, 2008 by Aggie87

[Aggie87]

Neither is the casual explanation -- in what was believed to be an all-time first -- that referees do, in fact, call games differently according to the clock or the calendar. NBA spokesman Brian McIntyre said that the three-man crew of Joey Crawford, Joe Forte and Mark Wunderlich was heeding a league guideline for dialing back their whistles according to the situation.

This is interesting to me, that the NBA apparently calls games differently at different points in time. And there's an implicit statement that the game will be called differently depending on how big a star the player is - star players will get the benefit of calls that lesser players won't at the end of the game.

This suggests to me that if the roles were completely reversed, Kobe would definitely have gone to the free throw line had he been fouled at that point in the game with everything on the line.

[Noj]

Well, apparently the league not only calls the game differently in last few seconds, but it decides to second-guess its referees for only the last few seconds. Why not review every call in the game if they're going to review one? Let's do a game-long instant replay and decide games by how many bad calls went against a team instead of the final score.

Celtics about to put this one away...

[Free For All]

If the Celtics have any hope of beating the red-hot Lakers, they need to win this one tonight and get a bit of a rest. I think that was a factor in the Spurs series.

[Free For All]

Garnett bricks two free throws! Ouch!

[Aggie87]

If the Celtics have any hope of beating the red-hot Lakers, they need to win this one tonight and get a bit of a rest. I think that was a factor in the Spurs series.

I agree with you. I still don't understand how they decide what games happen when. Assuming the Celts close this out tonight, why do they get a week off until Game 1 of the Finals? Why not a 36 hour turnaround like the Spurs had last time?

edit - NBA.com shows the Finals having 3 days between some of the games instead of two, as well. Interesting they wouldn't do that in the previous round.

Edited May 31, 2008 by Aggie87

[Free For All]

If the Celtics have any hope of beating the red-hot Lakers, they need to win this one tonight and get a bit of a rest. I think that was a factor in the Spurs series.

I agree with you. I still don't understand how they decide what games happen when. Assuming the Celts close this out tonight, why do they get a week off until Game 1 of the Finals? Why not a 36 hour turnaround like the Spurs had last time?

Well, it's the difference between closing it out in 6 instead of 7 games, right?

[Free For All]

David Stern must have a huge boner right now!

[Aggie87]

If the Celtics have any hope of beating the red-hot Lakers, they need to win this one tonight and get a bit of a rest. I think that was a factor in the Spurs series.

I agree with you. I still don't understand how they decide what games happen when. Assuming the Celts close this out tonight, why do they get a week off until Game 1 of the Finals? Why not a 36 hour turnaround like the Spurs had last time?

Well, it's the difference between closing it out in 6 instead of 7 games, right?

That's part of it I'm sure. But shouldn't there be 2 days off between any series? And then why do some series get to have extra days between games and some don't?

[Noj]

It will be a war. The teams match up well. Both are deep. Both have lots of weapons. Should be great!

[Free For All]

It will be a war. The teams match up well. Both are deep. Both have lots of weapons. Should be great!

Even though LA is a young team, they have more playoff experience. I don't really have a dog in this fight, I just hope it goes to 7 games.

Kobe vs. Kevin. Should be good!

[BruceW]

Lots of guys have good questions as to why what amount of games between series. But you all know the difference between the conferance finals and the NBA Finals, since more additional time for both teams to rest and heal to hopefully have a very equal contested series; that is teams with a full healthy complement of players where possible. Simple.

:bwallace2:

Damn ass Detroit lost again. Major changes next year. OR was it the Flip curse??

[Jim Alfredson]

'Sheed didn't show up until it was too late. Disappointing game.

I think Detroit matched up with LA better. LA will win it all, probably in 5 or 6 games.

[Chalupa]

David Stern must have a huge boner right now!

I really hope the Lakers win but the Celtics are deep and Garnett knows this is his last best shot. C's in 6.

[Chalupa]

Neither is the casual explanation -- in what was believed to be an all-time first -- that referees do, in fact, call games differently according to the clock or the calendar. NBA spokesman Brian McIntyre said that the three-man crew of Joey Crawford, Joe Forte and Mark Wunderlich was heeding a league guideline for dialing back their whistles according to the situation.

This is interesting to me, that the NBA apparently calls games differently at different points in time. And there's an implicit statement that the game will be called differently depending on how big a star the player is - star players will get the benefit of calls that lesser players won't at the end of the game.

This suggests to me that if the roles were completely reversed, Kobe would definitely have gone to the free throw line had he been fouled at that point in the game with everything on the line.

And this is news to you?? This is how it's always been in the NBA. Star players (and good teams) always get the call.

[Aggie87]

Neither is the casual explanation -- in what was believed to be an all-time first -- that referees do, in fact, call games differently according to the clock or the calendar. NBA spokesman Brian McIntyre said that the three-man crew of Joey Crawford, Joe Forte and Mark Wunderlich was heeding a league guideline for dialing back their whistles according to the situation.

This is interesting to me, that the NBA apparently calls games differently at different points in time. And there's an implicit statement that the game will be called differently depending on how big a star the player is - star players will get the benefit of calls that lesser players won't at the end of the game.

This suggests to me that if the roles were completely reversed, Kobe would definitely have gone to the free throw line had he been fouled at that point in the game with everything on the line.

And this is news to you?? This is how it's always been in the NBA. Star players (and good teams) always get the call.

It's news because it is now explicit. Before it was just sort of assumed, at least to me and my circle.