Aggie87

No Donut For You!!!

Hmmm..... $95 or free from some of those downloading sites..... Seriously, it's a beautiful package Al, you'll love it.

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.

I like Negra Modelo quite a bit, as well as Bohemia. Both good Mexican brews.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Happy Birthday Bill!

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.

RIP, Hedley.

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

"Hey!! Can you guys sing Waters of March for me?"

Chas' first post was very judgemental (calling people "object-fetishist/golden-eared/"principled" folks"), and his judgements continue ("uppity", "clueless", po faced", "sanctimonius") and yet the irony is that he basically tried to undercut Parkertown's auction by recommending people steal music instead of buying it from Parkertown. Why he chose to arbitrarily pick this particular thread to recommend "free" downloading is a mystery - his argument applies to every sale/auction thread, and therefore doesn't really belong in *any* particular sale/auction thread. It's a topic that deserves its own discussion, and already has, painfully, over and over. I wonder when somebody starts a new thread talking about a Prius they just purchased if Chas will hop in and tell the poster that he screwed up and should have merely stole a car off the lot instead.

They just announced during tonight's game that the NBA had reviewed last night's game, and said that a foul should have been called at the end of the game, with 2 free throws.

I think most of us would agree with that. So you go from "he should be shooting 2 free throws to tie it" to "he should be shooting 3 free throws, with a chance to win it".

But what they're doing is deciding the outcome of the game by not making the right call. Another missed call by the refs. That's the old 'two wrongs make a right' thing. Poor officiating determined the final outcome of this game, either way, IMO. That's not right. I think I'd be better at letting this go if it were Game 1 of the series, instead of Game 4, with the outcome being a 3-1 series (and basically over), versus a 2-2 series, and deadlocked.

I agree Horry's foul last year was a cheap shot. And I don't think the resulting suspensions were deserved, either. But if we keep using this "karma" thing to use prior events to justify what happens now, then maybe Crawford was willfully ignoring Fisher's foul on Barry, because of his suspension last year. And if that's the case, then the game isn't being determined by the players, which sucks. In a better and more "fair" outcome, I'd have liked Barry to have gone to the foul line, made the two free throws, and then let the teams decide the outcome of the game in overtime.

I agree about the ticky tack fouls. The officiating in this game was terrible overall. I still think the Lakers got the benefit of a number of calls at the end. Sportscenter emphasized that Kobe travelled on the Lakers' last possession, which should have given the Spurs the ball with about 15 seconds left. Odom also fouled Parker on the play where he goaltended, but no call. And the non-call on Fisher's foul. Even if Barry wasn't in the act of shooting at the time of that foul (for 3 free throws), he should have been given two free throws with a chance to tie the game. If the roles had been completely reversed, and that was Kobe that got fouled by Bowen the same way with 2 seconds left, it's a guarantee that Kobe goes to the free throw line.

I think you're right Free. As bad as the Spurs played, they could have won at the end. But the ref that made the no-call (on a pretty blatant - IMO - foul by Derek Fisher on Barry) was Joey Crawford, the same ref that threw Duncan out of a game last year and got suspended for the season for doing so. Alot of folks think he has a strong dislike for the Spurs. Regardless, the Spurs played pretty poorly overall tonight, but it hurts to lose on a ref's BAD call, not the players. And since this game made the difference between a 3-1 Lakers lead and a 2-2 series tie, that call in effect is a large determinant in the series, not just this game.

You'll see final scores of 8-5 and 11-2 then. Plus, at breaks the players will get Doritos instead of Gatorade...