King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The Mavericks are hopping mad at the refs. They're also one loss away from losing to the Heat. They'd better quit complaining and work on stopping Dwyane Wade.
Read more: Sports, NBA, Basketball, King Kaufman, NBA playoffs, Sports Daily
June 19, 2006 | The Dallas Mavericks are angry after losing Game 5 of the NBA Finals in overtime Sunday night. The Mavs had plenty to complain about after a 101-100 win by the Miami Heat gave Miami a 3-2 series lead with the remaining games scheduled for Dallas on Tuesday and, if needed, Thursday.
And complain the Mavs did, about an alleged botched timeout call, an alleged backcourt violation on the game's deciding play, an alleged offensive foul by Dwyane Wade on the same play, about the foul that was called on Dirk Nowitzki, still on the same play, and about the Heat's 49-25 advantage in free throws, evidence of alleged bias against the Mavericks by the refs.
And don't forget they were already mad because Jerry Stackhouse was suspended for Game 5 as the result of his hard foul on Shaquille O'Neal in Game 4.
I'm often with Mavs owner Mark Cuban -- last seen storming around the court furious amid the Heat's postgame celebration -- in his beefs with NBA officiating, and I think the Mavs have a case on the Nowitzki foul, though good luck not having a foul called on a play where the biggest star still playing knifes through three moving defenders on his way to the bucket.
Even when there's minimal contact -- and the contact on Wade by Devin Harris' leg and Dirk Nowitzki's back would have had to have been quite a bit harder to qualify as minimal -- that just looks like a foul, and it's going to get called every time. It looked like a foul to me until I saw the slow-motion replay. The refs don't get those.
But beyond all that, you just can't complain about the refs after you lose an NBA playoff game. It's like complaining about the patterns of your freckles or the blobs in your lava lamp. These things are mostly random.
Not so random: Wade scoring 43 points, 17 of them in the fourth quarter and an additional four in overtime. He was literally unstoppable down the stretch, hitting big shot after big shot as the teams tussled to the finish.
Also not random: Nowitzki scuffling again, finishing with 20 points on 8-of-19 shooting and missing a crucial free throw down the stretch for the second time in three games -- he was 4-of-5 on the night, numbers that show he didn't spend enough time attacking the basket. To be fair, Nowitzki made some huge plays in crunch time.
Next page: The blunder of the game, and what's that backcourt rule?
