The anomaly there is that these guys know that every player in the NBA gets away with moving screens and especially fouls (Yao is the recipient of nightly muggings from opponents yet there are no special instructions to enforce fouls on cerain individuals), and so did the Mavs. Why pick out just one player for strict enforcement of rules. Shouldn't all the rules, not only on moving screens but all the others too, be strictly implemented, and not just on one player? And you could argue that Yao only fouled out once in the series, and only got an average of 4.4 fouls per game. Well, the problem here is not that he fouled out at all but the number of early fouls in the game renders a player, especially a big like Yao, practically useless on the bench for significant portions of the game. Count in the loss of rhythm and coming in to the court cold. Those fouls thus drastically alter the team's rotation, and guess what happens more often than not. And that is not fixing? The disturbing part too is that it is extremely plausible that Stern and company does this thing routinely. So there, don't you think games are officiated fairly and thus teams have reasonable chances to win whenever they play.
now with shaq screwing other players fiancees and babys mamas they can have a nice story to go along with the games. wat TD is saying isnt news really. everyone knows the refs help certain teams n players. that has always been part of the nba game. thats why dominant players were important. they help u win regardless of the officiating. we started out well in that series but blew it. those home games shouldnt have been that close to begin with. and we got blown out in game 7. so wouldve couldve but didnt. i thought we were rockets fans. in order to win, we have to let our play beat out the bad officiating. welcome to houston.. im sure ralph sampson wasnt supposed to beat the showtime lakers and we werent supposed to beat the knicks in 94 or magic in 95. thats just a frustrating fact of life as a houston fan.
Dream did travel, but you'd be surprised just how good his footwork was. Watch his plays in slow motion and you'll see that he traveled way less than Ewing or pretty much any guard. The man was a freak of nature. Anyway, that's kind of beside the point. The point is that the unfairness comes from suddenly changing the rules, not from what the rules are. If the league told Dream that certain traveling calls were going to be made in the offseason, that's fair since he would have time to prepare. Same with Jordan. But if they spring the rule change in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, without warning him about it, then that is inherently biased.
The main problem is that they only went out of their way to enforce the rules on Yao while the Mavs were getting away with doing the same thing.
I find that comical. They went to the enforcement of palming when a.i. was killing guys with it, did he become less effective? Great players adjust, end of story. If Yao would've start setting his feet on screens and the guard wouldve let the guy set up, then there would be no moving screens or picks. Some of those moving picks were laziness or lack of detail. Now, I'm not saying yao or the guards are lazy, I'm just saying that alot of small things lead to bigger problems. Do i think that was the greatest officiated series ever? No, but there was enough there that the rockets couldve slammed the door on Dallas and they didn't.
fair point. but had the refs been competent, we might not have needed game 7. we might've ended the series victorious in 5 or 6 games. first, to concentrate on on player (be that player yao or anyone else) cannot be considered fair. i don't believe all the screens the mavs set were all that legal. plus, like one other member said, even the league had decided to enforce certain rules, weren't they supposed to inform both team beforehand instead of doing it secretly? if i were jvg, i'd demand my $100k back now. since he's not part of the league any more, he ain't be afraid of stern any more.
how do you explain kg getting away with so many blatant travels? better yet, why the heck did the league change the rules to make lebron's crab move legal?
no... it doesn't exonerate no one. we, as a team, lost, after all, freaking 40 pts in g-7. that was one of the darkest times for me of being a rockets fan.
Its not legal, they don't call it every play because he doesn't do it every play. A carry/travel is when the hand in under the ball in a hesitation move. When he goes overboard, they call it. You and i both know dream used to travelalot and it wasn't called. This goes back to the point of making calls which had 0 to do with the rockets losing to dallas when the 2 big wheels were bricking crucial fre throws in a critical game.
JVG was told to retract his statement. Donaghy's statements come after he was caught and thus confirms what jvg initially stated (for those that believe donaghy). It just so happens to be a recent interview at a local radio show. Not sure what your argument is here if you believe the influences that happened in that series.
had they not missed the ft's, we might've won; had jon barry been more alert and held that rebound tight, we might've won even though finley was out bounds; had any rocket made a few more field goals, we'd have won; had the refs be fair, we'd have won. had... really, what's the difference?
ibm, I don't think it was a great officiated series for the refs, but coaches will always the little things will get you beat. As I've said time and time again, tracy and yao make those free throws, game over. Jon Barry holds the ball high and tight, we have the ball. If someone, anyone plays decent defense on terry, we win the game and the series, but they didn't and they failed as a team. There are some things you can't control as a player, but there are thing you can do that will help greatly. Do those things and the chances for victory are much greater.
You know what? One thing that just occured to was why is there no replay of that Houston-Dallas game? If you remember last season Miami and Atlanta had a replay of the last few secs right? How come that game didn't have a replay, considering pictures show that Finley was clearly out of bounds when he stole that ball? Also now that I think about it, what's the ruling if someone steals the ball from you while out of bounds? is it a foul? Or just an automatic turnover, and you get possession with a reset shotclock?
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From what I've heard about the book and in a radio interview with Donaghy, he's basically saying Cuban whined loudly enough to the league that the league reacted by paying an inordinate amount of attention to Yao, enough so that it might have cost the Rockets that series. The problem is that Donaghy has zero credibility. Why people are listening to him now is beyond me. I hate seeing this guy capitalize on his shameful behavior. It's just sickening that he's making money off it. It's tempting to bestow credibility on someone when they tell you what you want to hear, but I think I'll just stick to the old saying, "Consider the source." And as fascinating as it might be, I won't be buying his book.
It would be one thing to just mention this confirms what JVG had said, ie that refs were instructed to watch Yao's moving screens more carefully. However, that's not what the OP is expressing. The OP seems to be going a step further and using this as confirmation there was a conspiracy to fix the series or at least parts of it, hence the use of the word "tainted." I don't hear any definite proof of that and don't remember that being the case from watching the games. I think the instruction to watch Yao did influence the series, but unfortunately Yao was setting moving screens. It's hard for me to be upset the NBA made the decision to more carefully follow the rules. It sucks because we happen to be Rockets fans, but if it was any other team in the league that was getting away with something they shouldn't be, then I would be cheering the NBA for trying to correct it and I'm sure almost everyone else would be too. Other than the moving screen calls on Yao, what else was there to prove a "fix" was in? There was the horrible no call on Finley's out of bounds swipe, but calls are missed like that all the time. A similar no-call happened to the Rockets in the 93 playoffs against the Sonics. The fact is overall these games were not called wildly in favor of the Mavericks, and I challenge anyone to try to prove they were. Accept it, the fourth quarter let downs of our star players in three consecutive games is what ultimately caused us to lose the series. There was not some huge injustice here.
