Apologies for stirring some bitter memories guys. Am telling my friend who is a Thunder 'supporter' (he jumped on their bandwagon at the beginning of this season) about why i hate the Mavs after the 05 series. Gave him a picture of Finley out of bounds - he's response "you can't blame the refs for a player being out of bounds? Then told him Dallas stood in the way of our championship that season as i feel we had a good chance of going all the way.. His response: "i did some research. don't hate. i don't know who mark cuban is. i'm going to guess he was the mavs coach. it is quite common for the coach of a team to meet with the CEO or referee's boss leading up to important matches in all sports? does that not happen in the NBA? some comments from game 3 "We had a lead in the fourth quarter at home, and we got hammered," Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy said. "That says a lot about Dallas, and I'm sure as we analyze and watch, we'll be disappointed in ourselves." Sura had 21 points and 11 rebounds for the Rockets, who host Game Four on Saturday. "We just didn't play well enough to win," Sura said. some comments from game 4 Terry buried a huge three-pointer with 26 seconds remaining and McGrady again disappeared in the fourth quarter as the Dallas Mavericks posted a 97-93 victory over the Rockets and evened their Western Conference first-round matchup at two games apiece. game 5 seems the bad calls were in game 5. interesting. Yao missed 5 straight free throws with the rockets in control. he makes them, u win, regardless of the terrible officiating. and then in game 7 u got beat by 40 points. the mavs then got bundled out by the suns, who got pumped by the spurs. u might be drawing a long bow brah to say it cost u the championship." Please help me educate this fool guys. I'm raging right now with him thinking he knows basketball by looking at game recaps.
We lost 4 out of 5 games, including dropping 2 of 3 at home and losing the final game by 40 points. Yes, that Michael Finley out-of-bounds play is infuriating, but if the Rockets were truly championship material they should have closed it out when they had the 2-0 series lead. Maybe if Bobby Sura was healthy things would have been different.
Show him an excerpt of the Donughey book that points to that series being called differently after Cuban's complaints.
The Yao/McGrady led Rockets never had the mental toughness to win a championship and once we did have that toughness, Yao and Tracy were never healthy. Smh
meh.. we never had a chance to win the championship that year. don't blame anybody else but the team itself for the meltdown.
No Keith Van Horn after Game 3 helped the Mavs too ... the Rockets must have been exploiting that matchup because it hurt that he was no longer on the floor. The calls were definitely bad in Game 5 though. Here are all the ClutchFans game threads from the games of that series: <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=94881">Game 1</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95059">Game 2</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95217">Game 3</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95427">Game 4</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95531">Game 5</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95692">Game 6</a> | <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95938">Game 7</a> Game 5 also gave birth to the first <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=95743">"Photoshop The Pain"</a> thread.
Kinda sad how we have to reflect on games played 6+ years ago because we aren't good enough to get their now
Ya, this is true. But this series still stings to think about. Hou should have won this series and knowing the whole Cuban/refs/Donaghy thing makes the defeat a little more hard to swallow. Absolutely no excuse for getting blown out by 40 in a game 7 though.
Too true. No we would not have won it all in 2005. But with at least moderately fair officiating we would certainly have won that series. Unfortunately our team was too mentally weak to overcome the calls.
Don't forget the fact that Mark Cuban b****ed and moaned to the league about the officiating (irony much?) after game 2, and then JVG got fined... the series turned drastically in the way it was officiated after Cuban's blow up. It was a royal screw job, I don't care how much we lost game 7 by. There's already testimony from refs that this was one of the series from the mid to early 00's that was altered.
The bad calls in the last few minutes alone costs us a potential 9-point swing in our favor. - Finley out of bounds, the "phantom foul" after we JVG explicitely told the refs we would NOT be fouling, the no-call beating we took under the rim that led to a turnover and there was another one I don't remember on a 3pt play. I do think that game 5 was key to the series (there should've never been a game 7). There was no way that the final few minutes of a game can be officiated that badly and that one-sided on accident.
