Even with the new lottery in place teams still tanked. Lottery night came, and the Golden State Warriors were the worst team in the NBA in and were hopeful they would get the first selection in the draft. All the lottery teams coveted Patrick Ewing of Georgetown. Ewing was the most dynamic center to come out of the college ranks since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The conspiracy theory here is that the NBA wanted Ewing to land in a big market.
David Stern the NBA Commissioner was a native New Yorker and he allegedly bent the Knicks envelope so that he would know which envelope to choose, and this assured Ewing would go to the Knicks. The Detroit Pistons were known around the NBA landscape as the bad boys, and their brand of basketball was physical and blue collar. The theory here is that the NBA thought it would be best for the highly star powered Los Angeles Lakers to be the face of the league still in The Pistons led the championship series 3 games to 2, and Isiah Thomas was putting on a show in Game 6.
The Lakers led at halftime but Thomas scored 25 points in the third quarter despite severely spraining his ankle in that same quarter. With 14 seconds left and the Pistons up by one, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was fouled by Bill Laimbeer on a play where Laimbeer did not appear to even touch Jabbar.
The Lakers tied the series and eventually won the championship, and many feel the Pistons were robbed of a title because of a horrendous call in Game 6.
The Magic were an expansion team founded in , and the expansion teams of the late '80s were struggling early on in the NBA. The league saw a team in the Orlando Magic who could be competitive soon, and were perhaps a player away.
With a slim 1. The Chicago Bulls were going through a season full of acclamation. This was due to the Bulls being without superstar Michael Jordan, and the team's fate now rested on the shoulders of Scottie Pippen. Pippen led the Bulls to a great NBA season by leading the team to 50 plus wins and a match up with the New York Knicks in the second round of the playoffs. The New Yorks Knicks were about to lose Game 5 against the Bulls, and the loss seemed imminent when Hubert Davis clanked a shot off the rim with two seconds left.
Seconds after the miss a whistle blew. Michael Jordan was on a mission to win his sixth ring, but late in Game 6 the Utah Jazz looked poised to push the series to a seventh game.
Michael Jordan scored a layup with 40 seconds remaining to cut the lead to one for the Jazz. The Jazz then put the ball in the hands of their best player in Karl Malone, but Malone was stripped of the ball by Jordan. The stomachs of the Jazz fans were beginning to turn throughout the arena. Jordan dribbled to his right then crossed over to his left, and also gave defender Byron Russell a slight shove to get an open look. The Bulls were once again champions, but they could have had to go back to Chicago for a Game 7 instead of a parade if an offensive foul was properly called.
Here we have another case of the NBA favoring the big market team over the small market team. The New York Knicks were on a miracle run through the playoffs as the eighth seed, and had made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals to face off with the rival Indiana Pacers. That wound up being a bad strategy, however; Harden made Meanwhile, apply this fouling strategy to a In terms of players in the NBA Finals, Kahwi stands as the lone target Kevin Durant is still out for Game One with at least one reviewable foul being called for him a game.
Besides the fact that LeBron is worse from the free throw line compared to Harden, we can conclude that Harden is the focus of these late game situations, as the ball is mostly in his hands. But, what he doesn't admit is that he also causes the most fouls that don't get called.
In other words, in the last two minutes of the nine games we looked at, he committed four fouls that should have been called. That's double the number of fouls that NBA Finalist Draymond Green, who is notorious for being a defensive enforcer, committed during this part of the season.
This breaks from a usual narrative that James Harden has: the flopper. ESPN wrote one feature on how he could draw fouls like an Oscar nominee, with several of the league's players agreeing with his expertise. Yet even here, he still has his shining moments as a bad flopper; on average, he was the disadvantaged player player who got fouled 2. In other words, at least two times a game, Harden tried to draw a foul and didn't get it, or the league looked at personal contact made between him and another player, but concluded it was rightly not called a foul.
Kind of. In the eight Raptors games listed in the Last Two Minute Reports, Kahwi was the disadvantaged player for 24 total non-calls. That's three a game, which is one of the worst in the league, but considering he also gets the most calls for him in general, this basically means that the Raptors trust him to have the ball in his hands during the last two minutes of a close game.
And for good reason: he made And still, his correct non-call rate is not as bad as eventual free agent Kyrie Irving, who had 26 correct non-calls in seven close games during the end of the regular season. Combined with two abysmal shooting performances in Games 3 and 4 of the Easter Conference semifinals, one could argue that something is up with NBA Champion Uncle Drew's ability to draw fouls and make shots.
And, in considering how he left for the locker room before the final buzzer in Game 4, a critic might just draw this conclusion outright. The Playoffs are, of course, the Playoffs. Harden, Kyrie, and everyone else get a fresh start despite the calls they did or didn't get since October, and that regular season record doesn't really matter anymore. What matters are those Playoff calls and non-calls, right? This question puts us into a rabbit hole here. We could go back and replay every one of those regular season games with every conceivable correct foul call, which may alter the course of the Playoffs itself by drastically changing the seeding of teams, should there be enough change in the results.
The 76ers and Bulls game that Courtney Kirkland called had that one incorrect call. And may have gone into their game against the Rockets two nights later with more momentum. But of course, this is only looking at the last part of this year's regular season. What if we looked at all the games for this regular season? What about seasons past, all the way to the first year that the NBA did these reports? This is where you, the reader and potentially groundbreaking NBA database creator, come into play.
We are well aware that our data isn't complete; we only counted the games following the All-Star break heading into the Playoffs. The Playoffs themselves? We're getting the data for it as you're reading this.
But what about the regular season pre-All Star break? Well, that's where we're going to pull down our curtain and ask for help. We admit that we didn't figure out a way to get this data in a speedy and efficient manner with no errors.
This leaves us, the community, with two options: either someone with way too much time on her or his hands manually does it, which leaves human error, or someone cracks the code to converting this data efficiently. So, who can we pass the ball to? We don't know yet, but we know someone in the KG Base community can slam dunk this. And in doing so, they will help us — the community of NBA fans — finally discuss what would have been in this league filled with Human beings. Edited by Joshua Fruhlinger and Jon Marino.
Data collected by the Thinknum team. Graphs and cover art by John Lee. Gifs by Olga Chernenok. A few bad calls are excusable; refs are human. When one team shoots 28 more free throws than the other, you have to look into it. I don't think there was any foul play here. If anything, it would have been in the league's best interests for the Lakers to win and even the series. I think the referees just did a downright terrible job. Game 7 of the NBA Finals is the first example on this list of referees bailing out a star player.
It happens fairly often, but in Game 7 of the finals? Well, I'll let the numbers do the talking. Kobe Bryant was shooting terribly in Game 7. He ended up shooting 6-of from the field, but I believe at one point he was something like 2-of Ask any scorer, they'll tell you that when your shot isn't falling, you try to get to the line. And that's what happened in Game 7. Kobe Bryant started barreling to the basket in hope of calls.
And the calls came. He went to the free-throw line 15 times. As a team, the Celtics did 17 times. The Lakers ended up winning in the final moments. Kobe was given Finals MVP side note, he absolutely stole that trophy from Pau Gasol , and people seem to forget what really happened.
If Ron Artest's three-pointer bricks in the final minutes, the Celtics may have won the game and the media would never stop talking about how Kobe can't beat the Celtics.
Kobe is a bigger star than Boston's entire big three combined. He will also be around a lot longer. If you wanted to say the league's best interests were for Kobe to win this series and instructed the refs accordingly, this is probably a good place to start.
But was the game rigged? No, there's nowhere near enough evidence to support that claim. What probably happened was that the Lakers had an easier time getting inside because of the injury to Kendrick Perkins. The refs knew this and had their whistles ready because of it. The Pistons led the Lakers by one point in the final moments of Game 6 of the Finals. They fed the ball to Kareem, he posted up Bill Laimbeer and went up for a sky hook. He missed. Game over. Pistons win. The Pistons are the NBA champions.
This is what should have happened. What actually happened was this abomination of a foul call. Kareem makes two free throws, the Lakers win the game and Game 7 and are the '88 champs. Only, they really aren't. If the refs would have gotten a single call right, the Pistons would have won the series. Look at the replay again.
I'd love for someone to point out where the foul is. The whole purpose of the sky hook was that nobody could block it. If nobody could get high enough to block it, how could Bill Laimbeer have gotten high enough to foul Kareem? He didn't, because, like everyone else, he didn't have the reach. This is probably the only call in NBA history to definitively swing a title, which is why it's so high on this list. But was there a motive behind it? You could convince me of one. Bill Laimbeer was notoriously hated by everyone, especially the refs.
In a play between him and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the five best players of all time, the tie is going to Kareem. Maybe that particular ref just has a loose definition of the word "tie," but I think there was some bias against Laimbeer involved here. If the same play happened with Hakeem Olajuwon defending Kareem, I doubt there's a whistle. That is the mark of a true bad call.
People remember Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals for the incredible comeback by the Lakers culminating in the most famous alley-oop in NBA history. The Lakers had a free-throw advantage in that game.
Neither were as high profile as franchise player Rasheed Wallace, but you could argue that they were more important in this particular game. The free-throw advantage is one thing. Obviously when one team is shooting 21 more free throws than the other, it doesn't look very good.
But when 12 of those fouls come at the expense of the guys responsible for holding down the opponent's two biggest stars, it starts to look really suspicious. If you're wondering, Pippen averaged less than three fouls per game over his career. With Sabonis out of the game, the Blazers had to defend Shaq—at his absolute apex—with 6'8'' Brian Grant.
And people wonder how the Blazers blew that game. I'm not gonna cry wolf on this game, though. As bad as the refs were, the Blazers blew it. If you can't hold a point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 7, you don't deserve to win the title. Still, a convincing case could be made for the other side here. My reaction to Game 1 of the Knicks-Heat first-round series was brash and premature.
I called it the worst officiated game in NBA history. The Heat had a free-throw advantage The Knicks shot the same number of free throws as times they were called for charging.
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