NBA Officiating Ridiculed Again!

Another ...

Kings’ Mike Brown Fined $50K By NBA
by Luke Adams

Kings head coach Mike Brown has been fined $50K for “aggressively pursuing” a referee during the team’s Sunday loss in Milwaukee and for publicly criticizing the officiating after the game, the NBA announced today in a press release (Twitter link).

Brown was ejected in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game when he confronted and berated referee Intae Hwang to express his displeasure with how the game was being called (Twitter video link via Sean Cunningham of Fox 40 Sacramento).

During his postgame press conference, Brown brought the team’s video coordinator and a laptop to show reporters specifically which calls led to his ejection (Twitter video link via Carmichael Dave).

“The referees are human, and they’re going to make mistakes, but you just hope that there’s some sort of consistency and there’s some sort of communication between the refs,” Brown said. “The refs tonight, they were great, they communicated with me all night. But in terms of consistency, you guys saw it right here. In my opinion, the consistency wasn’t here tonight.”

It’s a significant penalty for Brown relative to other fines that players and coaches have received for criticizing the officiating, which suggests that the league wasn’t pleased by the Kings coach’s on-court outburst — or by the extra preparation that preceded his postgame comments and the visual examples that accompanied them.

By comparison, Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic was fined $25K for a postgame rant ripping the officiating earlier this month.

Mr Big Shot was super mad that's for sure!

The Timberwolves picked up a big victory on Monday in a battle between two of the top teams in the Western Conference, defeating the Thunder in Oklahoma City by a score of 107-101. According to Wolves star Anthony Edwards, Minnesota got the win despite a “terrible” performance from the game’s referees.

“I’m going to take the fine, because the refs did not give us no calls tonight,” Edwards said on the Timberwolves’ television broadcast after the game, according to Tim MacMahon of ESPN. Edwards continued to criticize the officiating after heading to the locker room, bringing it up without prompting during a conversation with MacMahon.

“The refs was bad tonight. Yeah, they was terrible. We was playing 8-on-5,” said Edwards, who felt he deserved far more than the four free throws he received. “The cat got their tongue tonight, so it’s all good. It’s not fair, but it’s all good.”

Following a January 20 home loss to Oklahoma City, Edwards griped about the whistle that All-Star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was getting, telling reporters at the time that “you can’t touch him any time of the game” and adding that it was difficult to beat the Thunder “when they’re getting calls like that.”

As MacMahon notes, Gilgeous-Alexander went to the foul line 16 times on Monday, shooting one more free throw than the 15 Minnesota attempted as a team. Edwards referred to the Thunder star as “super good,” but suggested that he was benefiting from fouls that weren’t being called both ways.

“I haven’t earned (referees’ respect) yet, so it’s OK,” Edwards said. “But I think tonight was bad from the refs. It was terrible. We didn’t get no calls as a team. I got fouled multiple times, and I’m walking up to the ref telling him, ‘Hey, can you watch this?’ They just shaking their head. Yeah. And then soon somebody come down from their team and get bumped, it’s a foul. So I just feel like it wasn’t a fair game tonight from the jump. And so that’s why I’m super happy we won the game.”

Is it time to reel in the refs for their regular misuse of a technical penalty to players holding onto the rim for their own protection after dunking the ball? Tatum is a regular target of refs for this penalty and here's another that happened in the G-League recently that took the air out of the balloon on this one after Jordan Walsh lit up the arena in Ontario with his monster put-back:

Most G-Leaguers will never pull off a play that gets them the side-by-side treatment with Michael Jordan, but Celtics draftee Jordan Walsh earned his trending status on Tuesday.

Flying through the lane like a cold-blooded Arya Stark hellbent on vengeance, Walsh put back a missed free throw with a thunderous dunk that forced him practically sideways.

It evoked memories of Jordan piercing the Blazers to throw down a Scottie Pippen miss 30 years ago and it turned an otherwise sleepy gym in Mississauga, Ontario into ground zero for "holy crap, did that just happen?"

And then the whistle blew.

In the course of converting his marvelously athletic play, Walsh held onto the rim. With his body swinging nearly parallel to the floor, he countered his momentum by holding on for dear life while boomeranging back towards the lane.

Perhaps it was the final pull-up, or maybe it was the slightly splayed legs, but Walsh's career highlight was quickly marred by the worst call in professional sports: the technical foul for hanging on the rim.

For a league that has expertly finessed its product into a showcase for some of the most creative athletes in the world, the NBA's focus on rim-hanging T's feels pointlessly anachronistic. It's guaranteed to draw groans from both home and rival fans, and yet we see the call everywhere, from the highest levels of the NBA on TNT, to random G League tilts in Canada, down to high school and college games for anyone who can jump that high.

The question is, why? It feels like a misguided callback to the 1990s, when the NBA grew so concerned the game had turned "thuggish" that it legislated any flair into oblivion for fear it would alienate the audience. This was problematic for many reasons, particularly cultural, but it turns out that fan sensibilities aren't as delicate as the powers-that-be once believed.