For the first time in the playoffs, all three members of The Big Three showed up at once and took control of the game last night in Boston.
Garnett, Pierce and Allen?
Nope.
Crawford. Delaney. Mauer.
From the outset of the game, these officials completely took LA out of the game, especially Kobe, by calling a flurry of touch fouls and continuously putting Boston on the line, to the tune of a 19-2 advantage in the first half, and 38-10 for the game.
38-10!
Analysts and talking heads get lazy when presented with this discrepancy and attempt to explain it away with such cliches as, "LA wasn't nearly as aggressive as Boston. They didn't take it to the hoop enough."
Really? How about the fact that LA was 18-30 on layups and dunks for the game, Boston was 16-18, and that included the whatthefuck efforts of Leon Powe. So the Lakers have nearly twice the attempts in the paint and receive a total of 10 FTs? Gasol and Odom combined to miss 8 of their 16 layup and dunk attempts, and guess how many free throws they were awarded.
One.
Powe himself had more free throw attempts than the entire LA team 13-10. Granted, he was aggressive (Hey! I can be an analyst!) but he only played a little more than 14 minutes in the game.
As Phil Jackson put it:
“I have no question about the fact that my players got fouled but didn't get to the line. That's ridiculous,” Jackson said. “You can't play from a deficit like that that we had in that half, 19-2 (in foul-shot disparity). I've never seen a game like that in all these years I've coached in the (NBA) Finals. Unbelievable.”
I won't blame the refs entirely for the outcome of the game, but that performance last night puts that crew in a Salvatorean class. Like the Mavericks in 2006, who were virtually castrated by the refs' preferential treatment of Dwyane Wade, the Lakers have now been on the wrong end of a referee gang bang.
And now they have to win all three games at home to make this a series.*
“You can’t do anything because if you do anything they’re going to go to the line,” said Sasha Vujacic. “We went to line 10 times. It will be a different story in L.A.”
It better be.
*Something that has only happened once in NBA history since the league adopted the 2-3-2 format in 1985. What team managed to lose all three road games? Yep, you guessed it. The Dallas Mavericks. Yet another embarrassing playoff record they own.
4 comments:
This is the perfect illustration of why I don't watch NBA basketball.
Baseball officiating is MUCH better...right?
Baseball officiating, while spotty, can't be applied in a systematic ass-fucking type of method like this.
I don't watch much regular-season basketball, but I can remember offhand three instances in which Systematic Ass-Fucking Officiating was applied in the final two rounds in the playoffs - Salvatore's coming-out party in Game 7 of the West finals between the Lakers and Kings, the Donaghy Daily Double with the Mavs and Heat, and last night.
It was truly abysmal. Leon Powe -- barely even a rotation player, let alone a star who "deserves" calls -- shot more free throws in the first two minutes he played than the entire Lakers team shot in the first three quarters of the game.
Salvatore will be there in Game 3 to tilt it back toward the Lakers.
It isn't perfect by any stretch, but I would say that, yes, officiating in baseball is MUCH better.
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