Re: Call the fouls consistently

[Kim Malo <kimmalo@mindspring.com>]

At 03:36 PM 5/28/02 -0400, Mac Alsup wrote:
>I will say that we were robbed by the officials.  I just felt that there 
>was a serious double-standard.  At least make the calls on both end.  I 
>felt like the refs have been listening to the media rant and rave about 
>how good Kidd is.  He jumped in front of driving Celtics several times and 
>drew the charge.

Well, I half agree, and definitely think you've hit the key point. The 
problem wasn't any individual call, it was the fact that things were not 
called consistently against both teams. I'm more inclined to think a fair 
amount of it was in response to the crowd rather than anyone's press 
clippings - the ref's resentment at the constant chorus of BULL-SHIT (I'm 
assuming that was bleeped out of the broadcast) paired with bending over 
backward to make it clear that they were not intimidated. Bavetta can be a 
bit dramatic anyway, but he seemed to go out of his way to rub some calls 
into the home crowd's faces, even gesturing the call again, after a crowd 
response.

OTOH, we weren't robbed. Life isn't fair. You grow up and find a way to 
deal with it. If you don't, then you aren't good enough. Like if we did a 
better job not getting picked off and rotating on defense, we wouldn't have 
been running and slapping late at people so much. The calls weren't fair, 
but if we were robbed then it's because we let ourselves be robbed.

An interesting  point about the growing up aspect that probably didn't come 
through on the broadcast BTW was that Walker seemed to be getting on the 
refs more in response to bad calls/non-calls involving his teammates -i.e. 
in his role as a leader- than the ones that involved himself. And seemed to 
be able to do it without having the refs want to kill him after. Another 
sign of his leapfrogs into maturity.

Kim