L2M report came out. Six incorrect non-calls in favor of the Spurs, two in favor of the Thunder. On the controversial inbound play, the Thunder were fouled twice (Mills grabbed Adams, Kawhi grabbed Westbrook). Ginobili was ruled to have committed a violation by touching the line.
Spurs lost that game fair and square. They petition the result of that game, the NBA's returning those fouls they got away with.
The refs let the players determine the game and I'm entirely fine with that, as long as there were consistent non-calls both ways.
http://official.nba.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/05/L2M-OKC-SAS-5-2-16.pdf
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
I guess the outraged posters last night have come to their senses that while the refs missed some fouls that the Spurs still had a fair or maybe an unfair, depending on how you want to view it, attempt to win the game.
Yes, given the new evidence that there were also non-calls in favor of the Spurs in addition to the non-calls favoring the Thunder, specifically the Ginobli violation of crossing the out-of-bounds plane that happened prior to the Waiters shove, there is nothing else to do as far as protesting or playing the game over again, because they missed calls that should've necessarily been called both ways, especially the Ginobli violation that was the first missed non-call and would've stopped all of the others had it been called. I have absolutely no problem with that and totally agree with it.
But I'm sorry, this is just not a justified case of "swallowing the whistle"/"letting them play" like you guys are making it out to be. There is absolutely no subjectivity or interpretive qualities to those violations. They should be called by every single ref in every single circumstance. Otherwise, you could make arguments that out of bounds violations and double-dribble violations are subjective in nature, but they're most definitely not. You're either in violation of double-dribbling the ball or being out of bounds or not. There's no interpretation to it. Thus, this wasn't them just swallowing the whistle and letting the game play - this was an empirically verified massive failure on the part of the refs to do their job. They just screwed up enough against both teams that there's really nothing you can do about it now.
And Smart457, I'm not looking to get in another long argument with you, mostly because it's been proven to be an exercise in futility, but you're still missing the entire point. The fact that the "Spurs still had an attempt to win the game" has nothing to do with anything right now. All the league memo did was show that the refs are highly incompetent, but they were highly incompetent both ways, meaning it didn't really favor one team over the other. However, if the Waiters violation was the only missed call in the last minute, they would've almost necessarily had to play the possession over again due to the objective nature of that violation, no matter if the Spurs had an attempt to win it or not.
Thus, while I agree that nothing else should be done because the refs were incompetent both ways, this is absolutely not a justified example, or really an example at all, of the refs swallowing their whistles or letting players play. This is an example of official fallibility and incompetence. The fact that NBA fans and the announcers for the game could clearly call that violation while it occurred right in front of an NBA ref with no call should tell you something about the state of NBA officiating.
