Apart from government positions, is there any job in the public eye so wracked with incompetent practitioners as NBA referees? The final call in regulation that screwed the Raptors is just the latest in an overwhelming display of incompetence.
I tend to agree with my dad that referees don’t determine the outcome of games (there are too many things that happen in the prior 48 minutes to say it all rests on one final play), but the number of blatantly bad calls you see in a single game is startling. Is there no accountability in the NBA? How is the performance of these refs judged?
It may not seem like it, but the NBA has an extensive referee monitoring and development program. Check out this story from the NY Times last year
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/sports/basketball/25referee.html
Also, Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban shared some of the research he did on referee tendencies, but this was a few years ago:
http://www.blogmaverick.com/search/?q=referee
Tricky situation. Not really a bad Ref call, but a bad Ref timer start. If they looked at the replay, I don’t know why they didn’t re-set the clock and start the play again.
If they did, however, the odds are Toronto would not repeat the magic and they go into overtime anyway where, if they were the better team that night, (according to the BJMe thesis) they would have won. But they didn’t. So I can’t feel too bad about a win that wasn’t stolen at the buzzer. I am saving my wrath for the first time ever I see my team lose a game due to a bad call.