I do think the league, as a courtesy to the Rockets given their admission that their referees really screwed up, should waive the $10,000 protest fee. That's a significant amount of money for our owner.
If the bucket waived off determined a game in the playoffs it should be replayed, absolutely. But the League's opinion that the Rockets had enough time to remedy is true. The Rockets were up a good amount and let the Spurs come back. It sucks that the refs are NBA refs and miss easy stuff like this, hopefully the punishment is severe and will make refs think twice about making this mistake again But the Rockets only have an argument to replay the game IF you can conclusively say it changed the outcome of the game. Once the refs ruled no basket, the Rockets played the game as if it was no basket, it's not like they played the game with the assumption of getting that 2 points back. They did what they should have done in protesting the call and making a fuss about it though.
What a bunch of horseshit. If this happened to the Lakers, I can guarantee there'd be a different outcome. Here's another thing not mentioned: THE REFS HAD ALL THAT TIME TO LOOK AT IT AND FIX IT TOO
While I don't necessarily agree with the final outcome, I'm glad they at least acknowledged that it was a screw-up by the refs on how they handled the challenge.
Infuriating "Rockets had sufficient time to overcome the error" Literally the dumbest line of logic I have ever heard. "Yes, he was robbed, but he has enough money that it shouldn't matter" "Yes, his car was destroyed, but he has 2 other cars, so no worries" "Yes, he was falsely imprisoned for 2 months, but he had hundreds of over months where he wasn't imprisoned" THAT'S NOT HOW IT ****ING WORKS.
With the statement released today, the NBA officially stated that the "extraordinary remedy" of a game protest is so sacred that it can not be used to remedy a mistake by league officials because the Rockets had time and opportunities to remedy the mistake itself. Wow. In other words, we did this to you, BUT you should have fixed our f*** up. You had plenty of time.
If the Rockets were not up double digits at the time, and the Spurs finished off the game as they did, they would have beaten us by double figures and the argument for protesting the outcome would have been even less convincing. The only compelling reason for the game protest is that the Rockets scored more points than the Spurs in regulation, if you properly count all the made baskets.
I can't believe that so many people are surprised that this current league office ruled against us. We never had a chance to begin with.
Yup pretty much the final BS decision and lame ass excuse, but did anyone seriously think the outcome of this protest would be any different ?
Yes, this is so subjective to me. How many leads are blown a year with teams up 13 with 7:50 remaining. Seems like it would be a decent amount actually? Does someone have a way of looking this up? I assume teams have a 5-10% chance of coming back from that deficit, maybe? Curious how many teams have come back from 15 with 7:50 remaining? Odds probably drop to about 2-3% maybe? Anyways, just amazing this kind of stuff happens to the Rockets. To not only miss the call but not realize that it should be a very obvious review. Also, I know this is a little soft and it worries me about the teams mental toughness or lack thereof but it is very hard to focus when you have been "robbed" of points. The momentum swing is unbelievable. Everything snowballs after a missed call/application of the rules and seems whole world is against you. This happened to the Stros in 2018 playoff against Boston where Altuve got robbed of a homerun all because there wasn't a perfect camera angle and Joe West and his 80 year old eyes making a fan interference call from 1st base just because the ball came back in the field. This caused similar confusion as Harden went after the ball after he dunked it. I just think the mental part of the game is kind of glossed over here where Spurs found new life after their deficit was reduced by 2 and Rockets were in survival mode after being robbed of 2 points. Regardless, I totally agree that Rockets played like **** in the 4th especially Westbrook. His blueprint should be last game against the Suns. Attack the rim, don't settle for jumpers, shoot 2-3 wide open 3's a game. Keep the turnovers down, get teammates involved, crash the boards. Don't shoot more than 20 shots a game...ever. Get to the line as much as possible.
I know this was an objective missed call, but late in the game Harden was clearly out of bounds with the ball before he scored on a play a second later. This missed field goal is not the reason we lost this game, especially considering AT THE TIME Harden hit a 3 pointer directly after anyway, which gave us a +1 spread over two plays. Plus, the referees were disciplined. That's the biggest takeaway from this story in my opinion.
