I hear this comment, or something similar, far too often when talking with people about basketball and how it is officiated:
“You should never expect the officials to make a game-deciding foul call in the final seconds. It’s not going to happen, nor should it.”
I should “never expect” a call in the final seconds? “Not gonna happen, nor should it”?! I am sooo sick of that attitude. I think it is complete BULL$#!@ to say refs should “swallow the whistle” just because it is (1) a star player, (2) the end of the game, (3) a playoff / championship game, (4) insert your own excuse du jour here.
That “sliding scale” attitude about when a foul should be called is just wrong. If you’d call it in game one of the regular season, you should call it in Game 7 of the Finals. If you’d call it in the first 2 minutes of a game, you should call it in the last 2 minutes… either it gets called always, or not at all. A foul is a foul is a foul.
People argue that the refs blowing the whistle in a last second situation would be taking the game out of the hands of the players and having the officials make a game-deciding call. Well, I say that officials not calling a foul in that situation is just as much the officials deciding the game by allowing a foul to take place with impunity.
I hear this one a lot too:
“Officials who do make calls in those situations are going to catch major heat and be ridiculed.”
So what?!? So they shouldn’t make a correct call just because some pundits, talking-heads, and homers will blast them and make fun of them? That is ridiculous! Hey, I don’t want sour-grape “whining” in my sports, but I do want justice. And if an official doesn’t have the cojones to make the tough call at the end of a game / in hostile territory then they shouldn’t be officiating. Period.
