NBA referees fire back at Last Two Minute report from Warriors-Pelicans game
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a referee fight on our hands.
When the Golden State Warriors held on to beat the New Orleans Pelicans on Tuesday night, their victory came with a healthy bit of controversy. Draymond Green stripped Anthony Davis for a game-sealing steal in the closing seconds, yet the Pelicans big man felt that he was fouled and reacted accordingly:
https://vine.co/v/5QndB3bLZgJ
The next day, the NBA's league office announced in its Last Two Minute report that Green should have been called for a foul on the play. Specifically, the NBA ruled that "while the steal itself is legal, [replay] shows that prior to the steal, Green [GSW] puts two hands on Davis' [NOP] back and bunches his jersey in a hand."
So case closed, right? By the letter of the law, that's a foul. Yet on Thursday, the NBA referees' official Twitter account took umbrage with that correction:
https://twitter.com/OfficialNBARefs/status/809513140564193280
As the official ref account implies, there is both an art and a science to officiating. If referees applied the rules specifically as they're written in the rulebook on every possession, the game would never end. We'd simply have whistles for hours with sporadic bouts of basketball in between.
Not all contact, then, is necessarily a foul. For contact to be illegal, a player generally has to gain an advantage. In fact, I'll share what one official anonymously told me during Las Vegas Summer League one year: The reason it often feels like refs wait to see whether a shot goes in before calling a foul is that subpar officials will judge whether an advantage was gained based on the result of the shot. If the ball drops, the thinking goes, then the contact was marginal.
That's not always the reason that a call might seem delayed, of course. More often, in fact, the cause is procedural. Certain officials are supposed to cover certain parts of the court during live play. If a foul call "belongs" to one specific ref, his or her colleagues will wait to allow said official to make the call before blowing their own whistles in case the offense was not spotted by the primary ref.
