Mavericks overtime loss to Lakers highlights important miscues

Bad officiating, worse execution

The NBA has no way of fining me, so I feel very comfortable addressing this topic. The argument can be made that the Mavs would be 5-0 if the NBA refs had half a brain, collectively. I wrote a lengthy piece about the failure of the refs in the game against Portland, which was still a more egregious individual mistake than anything we saw against the Lakers.

The fact is, if you get more chances to look at something and you still get it obviously wrong (or in this case, incorrectly overturn a call that had no business being overturned), that is a big issue. The foul by Damian Lillard was minimal, yes. It was still a foul and it was still called. At that point, you need video proof that what happened didn’t happen. That video proof must have been erased by the NBA.

Last night, the refs managed to miss two, in my opinion, major calls. The first was an obvious foul on Luka by Dwight Howard. The foul was so obvious, in fact that Luka needed three stitches in the back of his head to counteract the obvious foul. The refs felt differently about it.

The second one was significantly more egregious, which was talked about in the first slide. Howard pulled Curry back with two hands to get Danny Green open for the three. The Twitterers have been hard at work finding other reasons to prove that the Lakers would have won regardless, but it’s just not true. Seth gets to that ball before Green does if he isn’t held and that’s the ball game.

This foul happened right in front of the Mavs bench and two refs, but nothing was called and overtime was headed our way.

Now that I have that off my chest, we can talk about the real issue here. Whether or not we want to blame these losses on the Mavs, there are some serious areas of concern that, if addressed, would have the Mavericks at 5-0 regardless of whether or not the refs bring their seeing-eye-dogs to the game.

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