We live in the age of apparent sports transparency, having left the dark ages well behind.
In the grand scheme it wasn’t so long ago that Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in an NBA game, but it wasn’t televised; there were only 4,100 people in Hershey, Pennsylvania that night. It’s one of the iconic moments in sports history and we pretty much have to take people’s word for it.
Now?
The Toronto Raptors dropped a 102-99 decision to Sacramento Kings on Sunday night, a game that ended with a controversial call over-turning an apparent game-tying, buzzer-beating triple from Terrence Ross. It’s the most-watched few seconds of video since Abraham Zapruder was rolling on John F. Kennedy’s motorcade.
If you somehow missed it, it went like this: The Raptors’ DeMarre Carroll inbounds the ball to Ross with 2.4 seconds left, but not before the Kings’ DeMarcus Cousins tips the pass. Ross adjusts to the deflection, grabs the ball, whirls and drains a 30-footer as the buzzer sounds.
Game tied. Bedlam. Free basketball.
Not so fast.
Courtney Kirkland, one of the three referees – each of whom start the clock with a remote on their belt – notices that the game clock didn’t seem to start right away.
He approaches the scorers table for a video review, conducted in the league offices in Secaucus, New Jersey and after a few tense moments it’s determined the clock didn’t start immediately after Cousins tipped it and total time elapsed between Cousins getting his finger on the ball and the ball leaving Ross’ hand was 2.5 seconds, therefore the basket doesn’t count, even though anyone at home with a DVR could produce a screen shot showing Ross’ shot was taken with 0.5 seconds left.
Game over. Raptors lose. More bedlam, including Raptors forward Patrick Patterson lobbying to be fined with an evocative twitter rant – a nice modern twist.
The Raptors hadn’t decided as of Monday afternoon if they were going to launch an official appeal or not. There is a mechanism to do so but the success rate is very low with only one appeal – the Miami Heat’s 2008 protest of Shaquille O’Neal being incorrectly fouled out due to a score table error in Atlanta – being upheld in the past 30 years.
The NBA had done their part to be transparent about the whole thing. They had head referee Mike Callahan explain himself to a pool reporter after the game. They have a history of apologizing to teams who they judged to have been victims of wrong calls – the Raptors got an apology this time a year ago after they lost a two-point game to the New York Knicks when no one noticed Carmelo Anthony had stepped out of bounds in the final moments. Three years ago the Raptors got two apologies in one season.
They are only gestures, however as Patterson noted:
And the league even publishes a “Last two-minute report” – a full accounting of all the calls in the final two minutes of games – right and wrong. It’s a curious exercise since nothing can become of the errors, which pop up more frequently than you might have believed. It comes across like a 12-year-old earnestly being upfront about forgetting their homework in hopes they don’t get their smartphone taken away.
But the apparent transparency doesn’t have much impact. I think we’ve reached the point in sports where it’s got to be an all-or-nothing thing: All the cards (calls) are on the table, eligible to be made right, or none of them.
Even in the final plays on Sunday night the room for re-interpretations is massive.
One of the sub-threads of the uproar about Ross’ shot is that the Raptors should have had more than 2.4 seconds to work with in the first place. Kyle Lowry missed a free throw with 27.4 seconds to play. Cousins grabbed the rebound and called timeout. The officials determined that took nearly a full second. Some at-home detectives see Cousins asking for time with more than 27 seconds on the game clock. Subtract 24 seconds – the Kings turned the ball over on a shot-clock violation – and the Raptors should have had at least three seconds to work with in which case Ross had all the time he needed.
But as a judgment call – when Cousins got full possession to call timeout – there is no mechanism for review.
Another is that Ross might have reacted differently if the game clock was run properly. If he turned to shoot and saw 0.6 seconds instead of 0.9, maybe he would have got the shot up even quicker.
This is debatable – it’s not clear Ross had any other goal than to get the shot up as quick as he could anyway – but it does raise the question of how to properly handle a clock malfunction.
All Ross was doing was executing as well as he could with the time he had. Once it’s determined there was a clock error why should he and the Raptors be penalized?
Why can’t the NBA do what would happen at every pick-up game across North America: Have a do-over.
At the moment there is no rule allowing for that. In the case of a clock malfunction they simply time the play in question and if it was completed in the amount of time that was on the game clock or less, it stands. If it takes a fraction of a second more the basket doesn’t count.
It’s a subject that would have to be reviewed by the league’s competition committee – Raptors president Masai Ujiri sits on it – but the soonest anything could be implemented would be next season.
In the meantime, Raptors nation – and even many within the Raptors organization – can only sit and stew. Notions of an anti-Canadian conspiracy are never far away among a certain strain of Raptors fans. There is a reason that We The North – a slogan that panders to the fan base’s sense of isolation and alienation – has resonated so powerfully over the past three years.
It’s hard to make the case in this case – a Sunday night Kings-Raptors game was the one the league was waiting to put the fix in on? But that hasn’t stopped countless people from doing their own video reviews and posting their findings online. And it won’t stop it in the future.
The answer as the league thrusts deeper and deeper into the digital age is to have all the calls reviewed, or none at all.
Open the curtain all the way. Make everything visible. Do it for Wilt.