More on Refs...

John Hollinger writes the following:

"No, the problem is a more basic one: consistency. If players don't know what a foul is from night to night or quarter to quarter, it's inevitable that they're going to be upset, and equally inevitable that fans are going to start flinging conspiracy theories at the wall to explain what they're seeing. In a perfect world, the words "adjusting to the officiating" would never have to be mentioned.

Whether I've been watching in person or on TV, it's hard not to notice that the overall quality of the officiating is worse than it was, say, four or five years ago, and that the night-to-night consistency has been erratic as well. I'm not sure it has much impact on the league's popularity -- for comparison, soccer refs tend to be horrid, and it's still the most popular sport in the world -- but it definitely has an impact on the game outcomes.

And as the series moves to Denver for Game 6, that's likely to continue. With a tight whistle so clearly favoring the Nuggets and a loose one so obviously giving L.A. an advantage, it seems almost inevitable that the officiating will again be a huge story."

No doubt the media and fans are blowing this up, but it seems that whistle-blowing has suddenly changed from relatively constant to erratic. Who knows. It's fun talking about it though.

Addition to the Ref Saga...

"My single favorite old-school moment of the past two decades happened at the end of Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern finals, when Chicago's Jordan, Pippen and Grant famously blocked four straight Charles Smith shots to clinch the victory in New York. Were the blocks clean? I don't know. Did the Knicks complain after? No. Because you had to watch the whole game -- that play didn't just happen. All four quarters were played with that same cutthroat intensity. Unlike today, the officials didn't change their minds midway through the game on what contact was acceptable. They didn't try to manage the game. They let the players decide what happened and intervened when necessary." This is exactly the inconsistency all of us have been mentioning.

This is from Bill Simmons' article today on ESPN's Page 2. He's making my point. Also, it's a good read in general, so I recommend going through it. He makes some points that I don't think anyone has bothered to mention, such as the referees' being excruciatingly old for this increasingly uptempo game. Obviously, that isn't the refs' faults, but the NBA's.

Refs Ruining the Playoffs?

John Hollinger wrote this article a few days ago mentioning how most NBA fans have been complaining about how the referees' excessive whistle-blowing has ruined the fluidity of the playoff games. As he mentions, the number of blown whistles has gone up proportionally in the playoffs compared to the regular season, as it has in recent years. Thus, he argues that fans should not be complaining.

What he doesn't realize is that fans, like myself, are not complaining about the number of calls; we are complaining about the accuracy of the calls. As we all know, Nike and Vitamin Water have been plugging the dream Kobe vs. Lebron matchup for weeks, and obviously the NBA wants a piece of that lucrative pie. By having such bad calls (I have plenty to choose from) as Pietrus' phantom foul on Lebron in the waning seconds of regulation in Game 4 (as Tim Cowlishaw points out, if that was Ben Gordon or someone of that caliber, we all know that call wouldn't have been made, and it would have just been his "slipping" on the floor), the accuracy of the game is in question, since now many fans are skeptical about the motives of the NBA front office. Do they want an accurate product or do they want the money?

Why we even have to discuss this is a shame. Since the refs are already stopping the game by calling an inordinate number of fouls (according to Hollinger), why don't they stop the game to review the bad or controversial calls? Thanks to the Magic's being on the verge of beating the Cavs, maybe the league isn't rigged after all, and integrity is returning to the game. However, as long as Tim Donaghy's name continues to be uttered, the refs will continue to be scrutinized. I have no problem with that. I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say, "All we want is consistency."