By Michael Wilbon
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page D01
LOS ANGELES
All along, I've wanted to see a seventh game. But not if it had to come about
like this.
If you care about basketball, Friday night's Game 6 of the Western Conference
finals was a rip-off. The Kings and Lakers didn't decide this series would be
extended until Sunday; three referees did. Statistical evidence is usually
circumstantial, but consider this anyway: the Lakers had shot an average of 22
foul shots through the first five games of this series, but on Friday night
here at home they shot 27 . . . in the fourth quarter.
Hardly ever in 12 years of writing commentary have I devoted an entire column
to the issue of refereeing. Overwhelmingly, these guys are terrific at a
next-to- impossible job. And the three men assigned to call Friday's Game 6 --
Dick Bavetta, Bob Delaney and Ted Bernhardt -- are three of the best in the
game.
But to ignore the role officiating played in Game 6 of the NBA's showcase
playoff series would essentially be to ignore the primary story line in the
Lakers' 106-102 victory. And not addressing it would leave unexamined the
swelling chorus of concern among everyday basketball fans that the league
and/or its TV partner, NBC, has an interest in either helping the league's
most glamorous and marketable team, the Lakers, or at the very least
prolonging an already dramatic series.
Of course people believe that. The players themselves sometimes believe it.
Yes, Vlade Divac has a flair for the dramatic, but he spoke for any number of
people when he said late Friday night, "Why don't they [the NBA
powers-that-be] just let us know in advance? We come here, we go back to
Sacramento, back here. Just let us know."
Let me start by declaring I have no ties to Los Angeles or to Sacramento, and
have no rooting interest in the series other than that I did pick the Lakers
to win in six games. And I have zero tolerance for "conspiracy" stories, that
the NBA and NBC conspire to influence if not straight-up arrange the outcome.
Don't believe a word of it, never have.
Having said that, I have never seen officiating in a game of consequence as
bad as that in Game 6. It was bad in Game 5 in Sacramento, when the Kings got
the benefit of some very questionable calls, then unforgivably rotten on
Friday night in Game 6. Scot Pollard, on his sixth and final foul, didn't as
much as touch Shaq. Didn't touch any part of him. You could see it on TV, see
it at courtside. It wasn't a foul in any league in the world. And Divac, on
his fifth foul, didn't foul Shaq. They weren't subjective or borderline or
debatable. And these fouls not only resulted in free throws, they helped
disqualify Sacramento's two low-post defenders.
On the other hand, Kobe Bryant elbowed Mike Bibby in the nose in plain view
with the Lakers up by one, but no foul was called on Kobe, even though Bibby
lay on the court and then went to the sideline bleeding. The difficult thing
about refereeing an NBA game, compared with Major League Baseball and NFL
games, is that virtually every single call is subjective. But the calls made
on Friday night were just plain wrong, right out in the open for everybody
watching on TV to see, even before replay.
I wrote down in my notebook six calls that were stunningly incorrect, all
against Sacramento, all in the fourth quarter when the Lakers made five
baskets and 21 foul shots to hold on to their championship. I don't believe
for one second the referees have any agenda. Still, what would account for
perfectly competent officials making such bad calls in such a big game? Maybe
the same thing that affects players, like nervousness, or being intimidated by
the crowd (or mouthy participants), or anticipating contact instead of waiting
for them to occur.
Whenever I'm feeling so absolutely certain about some complex basketball
issue, I consult my basketball mentor, former Post colleague David DuPree, now
of USA Today. And DuPree told me Saturday afternoon that while he, too, has no
tolerance for conspiracy notions, "I've been covering the NBA for 30 years,
and it's the poorest officiating in an important game I've ever seen."
And when I checked my voice-mail late Friday night, I heard exactly what I
expected to hear: outrage. And these callers live mostly in metropolitan
Washington, D.C., with little emotional attachment to either the Lakers or
Kings. If people watching these games at home see Pollard fouled out of the
game without touching O'Neal, what do we think they think? I know what they
think. They think exactly what Divac thinks, that Sacramento would have to
have been letter-perfect to win Game 6 in Los Angeles because there is a
larger agenda.
I didn't say that's the reality of the situation. But that is, increasingly,
the perception. And therefore, the NBA has a problem.
It's not particularly new; we started hearing this in the late 1970s, heard it
through the Bird-Magic era, heard it sometimes when the Bulls dominated. But I
don't think the perception has ever been so widely held as it is now.
I talked Saturday morning to an NBA season-ticket holder and marketing
executive, a rational and insightful observer of sports. I asked him what he
thought of Game 6. "I didn't think it was that bad at all," he said of the
refereeing, momentarily stunning me. "It wasn't that bad because we all knew
NBC needed a Game 7."
This is what happens when you have such a wild disparity in fouls called from
one game to another, ridiculous 180-degree swings from one game to the next to
the next, as if Shaq ramming his elephantine shoulder into a defender is a
foul on Wednesday night, but not on Friday night. The Kings shot 20 more free
throws in Game 3, and Phil Jackson whined like a little pooch that the Lakers
were getting hosed. Then the Lakers shot one more free throw in Game 4. The
Kings shot 10 more in Game 5, prompting accusations from Shaq that somebody
was cheating the champs. And the refs responded by awarding the Lakers 15 more
free throws in Game 6. "Our big guys get 20 fouls called [in Game 6] and Shaq
gets four," Kings Coach Rick Adelman said. "They obviously got the game called
the way they wanted it to get called."
It speaks well of the Kings that they were overwhelmingly composed after
Friday's game, though a couple of veterans worry the younger Kings will adopt
a "They're-all-against-us" defeatist mentality that could hurt Sunday. The
Lakers, seemingly oblivious to being taken to the mat again, appear to have
regained some of their swagger. "We're the champions," Bryant said. "They're
going to have to take it from us."
The key matchup for Game 7 isn't Kobe vs. Bibby or Peja Stojakovic's health or
the Lakers' three-point shooting; it's how the referees are going to handle
Shaquille O'Neal. When we get deep enough into the game to make that
determination, we might have a handle on whether it's the Lakers or Kings who
will be headed to the NBA Finals.
