The NBA has an officiating problem.


Another day, another controversy for the NBA and its officials. On the heels of the Celtics two point loss in Los Angeles on Sunday, the NBA has announced that all the calls made in the final two minutes were correct on the floor.
I’m not going rehash what happened Sunday afternoon. At the end of the day, it’s one game out of 82. This team has proved enough already this season for me to know they’ll be fine come playoff time. What isn’t fine, though, is the obvious fact that the NBA has lost control of their officials and is doing nothing to fix it.

The L2M report was established by the NBA in 2015 as a measure of...well, I’m not sure. The league would probably claim it’s a measure of transparency, but it’s nothing more than a placebo. It exists so that teams and fans who are slighted by refs can feel they’ve gotten their pound of flesh after getting screwed. In reality, the league admits the calls are botched and we all move on with the same awful referees that worked the night before. Being publicly shamed for a bad or missed call is meaningless without accountability, and in the NBA, nothing changes but the date on the calendar and the teams involved. The NBA: Where Time is a Flat Circle!

Exhibit A:
This is such an indescribably egregious missed call that it’s actually sort of...funny. Bogdanovic is incredulous. The crowd murmurs in absolute disbelief. LeBron even seems stunned. Just an incredible sequence.

Exhibit B:
Staying in Utah, here we have the Jazz benefiting from a call that cost the Blazers a game. Dame Lillard had every right to be absolutely seething after this debacle went down. The NBA admitted they missed this call. So did Rudy Gobert, who committed the goaltend.

Exhibit C:


Did you know it costs $10,000 to protest a game under a misapplication of the rules? Mark Cuban does, and Mark Cuban doesn’t care. I love Mark Cuban because he’s never given a crap about the NBA fining him for speaking the absolute truth about their officials for almost twenty years. Fines or not, if Cubes was ever the NBA commissioner, I can almost guarantee he’d have no problem going out of pocket (if he had to) to make sure the refs had an idea of what they were watching.

By the way, thank Basketball God that they're considering disciplining Mark Cuban. There's simply no place in the game for a self-made billionaire to put his money where his mouth is (insert James Harden eye-roll here).

NBA league revenue cracked $8 billion last season. Their growth rate has been the gold standard in American professional sports for years. They’ve got the most relaxed social media policy for sharing content, yet the videos that are shared the most are of their officials botching crucial calls. With all the reinvestment in teams and players, it’s time for the NBA to reinvest in the game itself. By hiring and training officials and subjecting them to actual discipline when they blow a call, the NBA will erase the notion that they care more about making money than they do about the integrity of the game.

The NBA is in the final two minutes of their officiating problem, and this post is their unofficial L2M report. Fix it. The game will be much better off in the long run.

Follow me on Twitter at @AdamCelticsLife

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