Hey Ref! Does Your Wife Know You're Blowing The Game?!

"Hey ref! Does your wife know you're BLOWING the game?!"

A famous quote by a not so famous friend of mine back in high school during a football game. I don't remember what the call was, but it was pretty bad and obviously wrong. Then again, its high school sports and you take what you can get.

However, the National Basketball Association is not a high school or college league. It is professional.

The league recently ended one its most exciting seasons in years. There are a lot of great things the NBA can hang their hat on from this past season. From the emergence of young stars such as Chris Paul to the an extremely tight Western Conference playoff race, and capped off with the incredible one year championship turnaround of the Boston Celtics.

The 2007-08 season had amazing highs, yet lows as do every other sports season. The one tragic flaw this season had in my eyes was the officiating. Due to former referee Tim Donaghy being charged with gambling, including on games he officiated, calls have been under much more scrutiny.....and rightfully so. After all, Donaghy even admitted to attempting to fix games.

Sure, there are questionable calls that could go either way or are too hard to decipher, but those occur in almost every game. Every fan is going to want their team have a call go their way. I am talking about the inconsistency of officiating being magnified times a hundred. But don't just take my word for it...

Former player and ESPN NBA analyst Jalen Rose has stated in the past that there are too many discrepancies in the game. For example, there are calls rookies don't get that veterans would. Then, there's the "were not going to call the same way in the final minutes of the game" calls.

Case and point: Brent Barry shooting a desperation three pointer with seconds left on the clock of the fourth quarter during Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals versus the Lakers.

While attempting the shot, Lakers guard Derek Fisher fell into the path of Barry and clearly fouled him in the replays that followed. Up to that point, the Lakers had been leading 93-91. Had Derek Fisher been called for a foul, there would have been a pretty good chance Brent Barry would have made at least two out of the three free throws, as he was 80% from the charity stripe that postseason.

Instead, there was no call and the game was won 93-91 in favor of Los Angeles. The Lakers took a commanding 3-1 lead with that win and eliminated the Spurs in Game 5.

Ironically, it was referee Joey Crawford that was closest to the no-call. You know, the same Joey Crawford who couldn't keep his cool and ejected Tim Duncan from a game last season, while on the bench! For laughing, while he was on the bench!

Due to that unprofessional behavior by Joey Crawford, Commissioner David Stern suspended him for the remainder of the season and playoffs. Not soon after, the Tim Donaghy scandal broke the news and all hell broke loose....

I am not trying to bash NBA referees.

I think they have a tough job, but them and the league officials as a whole, must utilize better judgment. The NBA did release a statement saying the no-call at the end Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals was a foul. However, they released that the next day and that is unacceptable to any fan, since the outcome had already been decided.

I will applaud the NBA and David Stern for manning up and even replaying the last moments of a Heat-Hawks game earlier in the season because of a bad foul call. Yet, these are just minor steps.

The NBA needs to realize that perception is reality and while there are always going to be conspiracy theorists; there are fans like me that will think twice about a call that goes unnoticed.

I could write all day about all the blown calls in the NBA this past season like how LeBron James was roughed up with no fouls called on the Wizards during the playoffs, the discrepancy in free throws between the Celtics-Lakers in the first two games of the Finals, etc. I could, but I won't because I would be writing a whole book instead of an article.

The bottom line is that the 2007-08 season was a great season and unfairly or not, was marred a bit by the allegations that referees fix games by Tim Donaghy. Personally, I believe those allegations are not true. I just wish recent history would not tell me otherwise.

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