The Weekside: Russell Westbrook’s Last Stand

Officially Annoying

When it comes to hitting a baseball, we accept the fact that humans usually fail. A few guys have managed to hit the ball 40% of the time over short stretches, but no player in Major League Baseball history has ever gotten a hit even 37% of the time he steps to the plate. The number seems low, but we have more than a century of evidence that it doesn’t get any better than that.

But we somehow expect a 100% success rate when it comes to officiating basketball.

It’s a patently absurd standard, and there is no historical evidence that 100% is possible. Intellectually, everyone knows perfection is unachievable, but there is really no reason to think anything even close to 100% accuracy is possible. And since there is no empirical data on correct/incorrect calls, for all we know, getting 80% of calls correct might make you the Ted Williams of officiating basketball.

Nobody has any idea.

But instead of looking at the near-impossible task of officiating basketball through reasonable eyes, we instead latch onto every bad call that happens to come at a key moment. The Final Four provided a wonderful recent example, with both of Wisconsin’s final games seeming to hinge on referee decisions.

In the first, the Badgers benefitted from the refs swallowing their whistles as they tied the game at 60 despite the basket clearly coming after the shot-clock expired. Then, two days later in the title game, Wisconsin was on the wrong end of a bad call when an out-of-bounds call went against them. The NCAA head of officiating even admitted that the Duke player touched the ball last before it went out of bounds.

Two things:

1. This ball barely glancing Justise Winslow’s fingertip is not what decided this game. Moreover, the very idea that a few skin cells touching or not touching a piece of dead cow hide is what should determine which team is better at basketball is ludicrous. The whole reason officials exist is to govern disputes when there is a disagreement over what happened or to intervene when somebody is going outside of the rules to gain an advantage.

A play like this is random happenstance in which nobody had any idea what was going on and everyone was flailing at the ball. Who grazed this ball last isn’t particularly significant to the ultimate goal of this competition: Seeing who is better at basketball.

The rules do provide for how confusing situations like this should be adjudicated. And by the letter of the law, Wisconsin should have been awarded possession. But if we didn’t have these ultra-high-tech cameras nobody would know who hit the ball last. Really, throughout the entire history of this sport, flipping a coin would be the fairest solution to determining who gets the ball next. And in the spirit of the game, that hasn’t changed even though we can microscope in on these, ultimately, meaningless aspects of the sport.

2. College refs are trash. I don’t watch a lot of NCAA basketball, because I frankly don’t enjoy the quality of play and, more so, I disagree in principle with just about everything the organization stands for. But I watched a bit of March Madness and found the officiating to be laughable, particularly in the Wisconsin/Kentucky game.

And, finally, here is how all this leads to the Association: I always hear people say how bad the officiating is in the NBA.

O.K, that’s fine. There are certainly multiple calls — or no-calls — in any given game that are terrible. But going back to the baseball analogy: In comparison to what?

If NBA officiating is awful and NCAA officiating is widely considered worse, where are the good refs? High school refs are a joke. And the dudes I play with in pickup straight make stuff up. Really, has anyone ever seen a baskeball game, at any level and said, “Man, that was some great reffing?” At least consistently over many games in any league?

Perhaps, then, the sport of basketball is just nearly impossible to officiate well?

None of this is to say that the NBA doesn’t need improvement.

There could be an equivalent argument made for NASA. It is easily the best space program in existence. (Disclaimer: I’m no expert, so sorry to all you cosmonauts or whoever if I’m … off base.)

But being the best doesn’t mean NASA is doing a good job. It doesn’t mean that, after shuttles keep exploding and catching fire upon re-entry, the governing body doesn’t need to hold the organization to a higher standard and ensure reforms are made.

Like NASA did, the NBA needs to fix things.

Some calls that refs make are head-scratchingly, perplexingly, unfathomably awful.

Stephen Curry, for example, travelled late in recent game against the Pelicans, but it wasn’t called and he was able to get off a shot that nearly went it at the buzzer. Those 3 points could have determined the game and thus altered New Orleans’ playoff destiny and perhaps helped the Thunder get the 8th seed.

That is a big deal.

Stuff like that — and good heavens this — needs to be minimized.

To its credit, the league does knows this and has backed away from its facade of infallibility. Especially since Adam Silver took over as commissioner, the league has been increasing transparency on its review process while trying to better communicate all the nuances of how and why calls were made.

But with all that fully understood and the league attempting to make progress, we also need to be reasonable: It is inevitable.

A playoff game is going to be “decided” by a bad call. It happens every year. The only thing that is surprising about it is that people are surprised by it.

There were 89 playoff games last season and 85 the year before. I don’t know how many of those games were close in the final two minutes, but let’s conservatively say that 20 of them were. And in those final two minutes of those 20 games — 40 minutes of playing time — let’s, again conservatively, say there was a call or no-call to make every 30 seconds.

That’s 80 calls in close games in the final two minutes.

If they get 10 of them wrong, that makes 87.5% correct. That seems great statistically, and chances are that only a few of those 10 blown calls are truly critical or actually egregious blunders.

Let’s say of those 10 were of the Steph Curry-travel-level or Wisconsion-post-shot-clock-level bad.

Is that bad? Messing up critically 3 of 80 times?

I have no idea.

Of course, these are made-up numbers with nothing more than a theoretical basis in reality, but history says that over the next two months of playoff basketball, there are going to be a few big referee blunders late in games that seem to “decide” a game.

Which is the other piece of nonsense baked into bad-call crying.

NBA games are 48 minutes long, and it’s largely a function of our crappy human memory and attention span that we over-prioritize the events of the final few minutes. It makes for a better story — and it certainly makes covering the games easier.

But to weigh the final two minutes so much more heavily than the first 46 is silly.

Really, if you don’t want to get screwed by a call late, there is a simple solution: Be ahead by more than one possession. If you don’t want to get beaten by a game-winning three-pointer after the buzzer: Be ahead by 4 points.

Coaches spend their whole careers trying to ingrain this into the brains of their players. Nobody listens, of course. It is human nature to procrastinate, so when you have a six-point lead in the second quarter, it is incredibly difficult to create an urgency to get up by 8. This is one reason basketball is a game of runs.

So, yes, being up by 4 or more points is much easier said than done. But even acknowledging that and admitting that the final minutes — winning time — are more important than the second quarter, giving more weight to what the refs do than what the players do is silly.

The refs are going to blow a few critical calls because they always do.

It’s the players and teams’ job to recognize this and not let their fate be decided that way. Yes, officials have a lot of influence, and they make mistakes. But saying they cost your team a win — or, worse, a seven-game series — is like saying you were late to your job interview because of traffic. Unless it was once-in-a-lifetime gridlock caused by a plane crashing on the freeway, nobody cares.

Just get to the office on time.

That’s the difference between being a professional and being a baby.

You didn’t lose because of the refs. You just weren’t good enough.

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