I was reading up other forums and a lot of people were talking about the Heat's 8 second violation. For those who don't know, the Heat were hit with an 8 second backcourt violation (after forcing one on Detroit) right after calling a timeout when inbounding the ball when the Pistons scored and Shaq fell and got injured hitting Walker's knee. I have the game taped, but before that, I knew we immediatley called a timeout after the inbound (the refs' whistle was blown confirming this), so I don't know how any time could've been shaven off the shot clock. Anyways I went back to go look at the play to see who's fault it was. Here's what happened: 1. Tayshaun misses shot after Shaq goes to block it. 2. Shaq fell and his face hit Walker's knee. The whole Heat team can see Shaq is down. 3. Tayshaun grabs the board and puts it back in. 4. Shaq wasn't getting back up and everyone saw this. Posey looks at Shaq before inbounding, before the inbound Payton was already signaling a timeout to the referee and he acknowledged it, and as soon as it was inbounded to Wade he calls a timeout and the refs acknowledge this too by blowing their whistle. Everyone walks to their respective bench. There was no way the officials or the shotclock keeper could've missed the timeout yet on the ESPN scoreboard it shows that the time and shot clock were still running (it actually started running about 3 seconds after the inbound, don't know why). It ran down 2 seconds off the game and shotclock. Since everyone thinks the shotclock is still at 24 Payton gets it up the court at what should've been more than enough time before the violation. Now I'm guessing since the players/coaches blindly trust the NBA with the integrity of the game (and if they dare question it we all know what happens --- they're touted as lunatic conspiracy theorists and are fined up the ying-yang) they didn't bother to check if the clock had ran down. With how many times a player is injured in a season or a timeout is called, I guess you tend to forget about these little things, and besides, with everything going all in a game, the coaches and players aren't supposed to be the ones making sure the officials and scoretable staff is doing their job. If they always have to be checking up on these people to make sure they do their job right then why do they hire them in the first place? So who exactly was the shotclock keeper that f'd up? Was it someone who was quitely rooting for the Pistons and was mad they had an 8sec violation called on them before? Or was it just the honest mistake from one of the incompetant personnel staff that Stern has employed to help him run his league? It's little things like this that everyone knew that there was no way in the world we would walk out of Detroit up 2-0. I don't think this was a game deciding play but I think when you're supposed to be the best basketball program in the world, the teams and fans deserve just a little bit better than that crap the NBA put out on the floor yesterday.
I love how Detroit gets away with so much and when they get called for something they make a little cricle crying around the ref. How bout Rasheed and Tayshaun going over the back. We should be up 2-0.
I still think Detroit played a better game and we we're killing ourselves more than anything. We didn't deserve to win it and it shows when we couldn't capatilize on the final chance that we had.
