NBA Playoffs: Non-Call Cost Mavericks Game…And Season

Ever since the whole Tim Donaghy debacle, the NBA has been very transparent in terms of their officiating. So in cases where the NBA determines that the referees have erred, they have beaten the press to the punch, usually releasing their own statement acknowledging that a crew made a bad call (or non-call). However, in some cases, such as yesterday afternoon’s Game 3 between Dallas and Denver, the lack of a call deserves much more than just an apologetic admittance of fault.

If you didn’t see it, check it out. In Denver’s 106-105 win, Carmelo Anthony hit the Nuggets’ go-ahead 3-pointer with just 2 seconds left in the game. However, prior to Anthony’s shot, a Dallas Maverick defender committed an intentional foul (because the Mavericks had a foul to give), but the referee failed to make the call, the defender stopped, and Anthony proceeded to drain the 3-pointer.

That is 100% unacceptable on the part of the NBA referees. To not make a foul call when a player is committing one on purpose has to be perhaps the most egregious error an NBA referee can commit. Before I totally bash on the referees, let me give Dallas some of the blame. Now I don’t know if they did speak to the referees about their intentions prior to the aforementioned play, but my guess is that they didn’t, and that is a completely egregious move on their part. Telling the referees what they were going to do would have assured that the referees would make that call, because they would have been looking for the very contact that was committed. And if the Mavericks are going to argue that talking to the referees at that point is going to tip-off the Nuggets, that’s absurd as well. Because with a foul to give, I’m sure the Nuggets knew Dallas’s intentions.

But I digress, because I certainly don’t want to put the blame on a non-call on the team itself. It is the referee’s job to make calls, and they didn’t do that for the Mavericks yesterday afternoon. Which is actually kind of ironic, because they made 61 foul calls in the 47 minutes and 58 seconds prior to that, but swallowed the whistle on the 62nd foul in the last 2 seconds.

The Mavericks have every right to be upset. The lack of a foul call disrupted the integrity of the last several seconds of the game, and that might have just cost the Mavericks a shot at making a series out of their matchup with the Nuggets. Now the series stands at 3-0, leaving the Mavs with virtually no chance of advancing to the next round. An admittance of wrongdoing by the NBA cannot fix that. The referees had a very real hand in the termination of the Mavericks season, and there’s nothing that a press release can do about it.

If the NBA really wants to fix the problem, they need to make it right and re-“play” the final few seconds of that game. I know that sounds ludicrous and absurd, but there’s no doubt that that is the right thing to do. It is a shame that this solution was not used immediately following the replay of Melo’s big 3-pointer, but it’s not as if we don’t have the ability to fix this problem. I know it’s a day late and a dollar short, but this solution makes every bit of sense. It doesn’t hurt the game, the players, or the integrity of the NBA Playoffs. What it does is correct wrongdoing, and I don’t understand what’s wrong with that.

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