"Robbed" is an Understatement
The NBA is a joke.Think about this ...
In the NFL, the officiating of a game is an actual issue. People, coaches, and players can TALK about it, discuss it, and even force the league to make changes (instant replay, QB rules, possesion rules, coach challanges). Everyone knows what the rules are. Bad calls are penalized and bad trends are corrected.
This is how a league acts when it cares about being a fair league.
Even MLB does this to an extent. Umpires are challanged routinely. Face-to-face arguments on the field between the coach and the ump are a time-honored tradition. Baseball changed the rules on the strike zone and forced the umps to comply. Also, they added two extra umps in the outfield for playoff and world series games.
Not the NBA.
The officiating in the NBA has been a complete joke for years and David Stern doesn't seem to care. Merely uttering the words, "the refs blew the game" would cause a heavy fine from the league. Coaches and players are forced into silence while the rest of us can see the obvious.
The games are not called fairly. The worst and most blatant example I'd ever seen was The Bucks vs 76ers conference championship series in 2001. This was when Tyrone Hill went through the entire series with only a handful of fouls. This from a guy who averages a handful of fouls a GAME. By the end of the series he was actually grabbing people and throwing them out of the way, knowing it wouldn't be called. The Bucks, on the other hand, were called called for every minor touchy foul the refs could find.
The Bucks complained, the fans complained, many promoted conspiracy theories that David Stern did not want the small market Bucks to face the Lakers in the championship series because it would cause low ratings.
The league has to know that is has a credability problem when it comes to the refs. The fact that they do nothing about it tells me that they like it this way.
And why do you think that is?
Why would a league prefer a situation where the games were not governed in a fair and honest way?
My take, ...because then they "influence" who wins and who loses.
Like in this game.
I watched this game. It made me sick.
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