Okay, there was something seriously wrong in Baron's situation. I remember getting up and screaming at the refs for waving that off. But normally, in all arenas of basketball shots that come that indiscernably close to the buzzer are counted. This will all change next year with instant replay. Also personally, I like to believe in the integrity of men, so saying the refs deliberately counted that shot to help the Lakers requires more evidence for me (like game 6, which had mounds of evidence). Maybe I'm just flawed that way. But it takes a lot more to make accuse a man of doing something so low as to disrespest his job in that fashion. Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Spurs suck.
<i>Forget game 6. Take away Samaki Walker's halftime 3 point shot in Game 4, and the Kings win it in 5.</i><p> In any basketball game, bad calls will be made that will result in an undeserved gain or loss of a basket. But all the baskets count the same whenever they occur, so it paints a deceptive picture of the officiating to focus on single calls.<p> Home-cooking is probably a real phenomenon, as is the star system. The former is an inevitable result of the referees' human nature, and the latter speaks to both the quality of the product (who wants to see Bird or MJ on the bench with foul trouble?) and the bottom line.<p> But to believe the system is rigged for the Lakers (or the Bulls, as many Knicks fans believed in the MJ heyday), you have to believe that the refs like the Lakers better, or that the league ordered the refs to give the Lakers preferential treatment. Absent any direct evidence of such an intention, both seem improbable: there's no reason why the refs would prefer the Lakers, and the league's bottom line, while it might be slightly improved by the success of large-market teams, would be devastated by the revelation that the games were fixed.
