It just wouldn’t have felt right without some additional shenanigans.
The NBA has delayed the Last Two Minute Report from Sunday’s games due to a “technical issue,” @NBAOfficial announced late Monday afternoon, after I had spent the whole day waiting to write a post like this. “Technical issue” is quite vague, but I will figuratively (and maybe literally die of laughter if it was something to do with timing mechanisms.
As it stands, we’ll have to wait to find out if the NBA will be issuing an “our bad” for the confusing end of the Raptors-Kings game, one that saw Terrence Ross force overtime on a clean buzzer-beater only to have the shot overturned because the clock started late. We won’t rehash it all – to catch you up, here’s the Quick Reaction, the Reaction Podcast, and a special late-night post going deeper on the call in question.
Here’s a chunk from there, though:
Do the Raptors appeal? Almost definitely. The sequence of calls makes no sense, and the Raptors are justified in appealing.
Will they win? Maybe. There haven’t been a lot of successful appeals in the past, but teams aren’t completely winless, and again, the Raptors feel pretty justified here.
Well, it sounds as if they are going to appeal, after all. Sportsnet’s Michael Grange tweets that the Raptors are putting together a formal protest on the grounds that a replay review for fractions of seconds is not reflective of the assumed human error in other scenarios, and that Ross was responding to the clock he saw, not the hypothetical one.
You can make either of those cases pretty well. You’re talking about a digital review overturning something by 0.1 seconds but ignoring that 0.1 seconds is such an infinitesimal amount of time that it’s likely that most clock scenarios are off by about that much (like, oh, I don’t know, the missing 0.8 seconds or so that came off after DeMarcus Cousins gained possession two plays prior). As for whether Ross could have gotten a shot off earlier, well, no, maybe he couldn’t have, given the balance and defense at play, but like I wrote last night, that’s something that should be left up to the players to determine on the court.
Again now, from last night:
What if they win? This is where it gets tricky. The Heat won an appeal a few years back, and the end of the game was replayed. But that game had the benefit of those teams playing again later that year – the Raptors and Kings don’t play again this year, and it becomes difficult, logistically, to find a good time to make up the final 2.4 seconds (and let’s be real, overtime, because Terrence Ross is a cold-blooded crunch-time killer). The Raptors and Kings are both in California just after the holidays, but it’s hard to figure if the NBA (and if both teams) would warrant it a big enough deal to have one or both teams travel and add an extra partial day to an already too-dense schedule. That the outcome might not matter much shouldn’t change the process, especially in November when we don’t know if the game will matter (it could matter for the Raptors’ playoff seeding and the Kings’ lottery seeding), anyway. It’s just a logistical pain in the ass if it needs to be re-played.
So, yeah. The rule maybe needs to be tweaked to allow for a re-playing of the final seconds in scenarios like this, because the replay booth may have made the correct call, but it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense to punish a team for a clock malfunction and the resultant (assumed) butterfly effect of the theoretically correct call.
What a mess. And it’s probably only going to get messier.
