Oscar-worthy flops tough call in playoff heat
As DeMarre Carroll hobbled off the practice court on Sunday afternoon — diagnosis: sore ankle that will not keep him out of Monday’s Game 4 — he spent a few moments reliving LeFlop de LeBron.
By now you’ve probably seen LeFlop. Raptor fans were outraged by it — the phantom foul that got Carroll initially slapped with a technical foul in Saturday’s Game 3 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers at the Air Canada Centre. And assuming you’ve seen it, you know why the play still riles the faithful. The blow that sent LeBron James to the hardwood as though he’d been struck by lightning, after all, was actually delivered by the arm of James’s teammate, Tristan Thompson, albeit with some crafty assistance from Carroll, the Raptors forward whose well-placed elbow urged Thompson’s arm in the direction of James’s face. Still, James embellished, as he does.
“Everybody says he deserves an Oscar,” Carroll said on Sunday.
And so the play turned out to be Exhibit A in a case being made in the court of public opinion that argues the Raptors are doomed to get jobbed by the refs in this Eastern Conference final. The NBA, the old saw goes, is a star-driven league that coddles its biggest names with plush treatment that includes favourable calls in crucial situations. Toronto’s best players, in the shadow of the mighty King James, simply don’t rate.
Speaking after practice on Sunday, long after Carroll had his technical foul rescinded upon video review, Carroll deadpanned his recollections of the incident.
“(LeBron) thought I hit him, so he falls on the ground. He’s not acting. He really got hit. He’s 270, 280 pounds, the LeBron James that flexes when he scores a layup on DeMar DeRozan, one of our most physical players,” said Carroll, the sarcasm dripping from his lips. “You do the math.”
Certainly the Raptors have been doing some arithmetic, and on the surface it doesn’t seem fair. So far in the series Toronto has been called for 73 fouls to Cleveland’s 43. The Cavaliers have shot 35 more free throws than the Raptors. And simply for alluding to such disparities, albeit repeatedly, Raptors coach Dwane Casey has been rendered $25,000 poorer — the amount he was fined by the league on Sunday for public criticism of the whistleblowers in the wake of Saturday’s win.
If Casey’s incessant broadsides of the officiating took some of the focus away from his team’s great performance, it was no accident. If an NBA coach’s role is part strategist and part psychologist, most also see themselves as full-time referee lobbyists.
Attempting to influence the zebras, both with incessant chatter from the sidelines and calculated messaging in the media, has been a favourite pastime of most of the great coaches in recent memory. It was certainly a go-to move of Phil Jackson, who earned six of his record 11 championship rings coaching Michael Jordan. And it was Jordan’s reign as the league’s alpha male that probably led to the popularization of the idea of superstar bias.
All these years later, there are those who’ll tell you the tradition is being upheld with the calls bestowed on the likes of LeBron.
“There is that rumour out there,” Raptors big man Luis Scola said with a wide grin.
Don’t take that to mean that Scola counts himself among the tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists who, 10 years ago next month, cheered wildly as Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, stormed the court after an NBA final loss to the Miami Heat and reportedly shouted at then-commissioner David Stern, “Your league is rigged!” (Cuban was convinced the referees were giving Miami’s Dwyane Wade the Jordan-esque treatment.)
And don’t think Scola is endorsing the railings of the armchair experts convinced Toronto is somehow being done wrong by a crooked system. Those experts would be wise to consider Scola’s viewpoint on the topic.
The 36-year-old veteran has been playing pro basketball since he was 15. And as a younger man, he probably could have been convinced basketball’s scales of justice were wildly out of balance. He’s grown to see things differently.
“I do believe now — which probably 10 years ago, I didn’t — (that) if you take all the calls, you will see fair treatment,” Scola said. “And a lot of times you’ll talk to the Raptors and they’ll say, ‘Oh my god, (the refs) killed us.’ And the very same game you go across the locker room and you talk to the Cavs and they’ll say, ‘Oh my god, they killed us.’ How can they kill both?”
It’s possible to kill both because a bad call is in the eye of the beholder. As egregious as Saturday’s LeFlop happened to be, there wasn’t much chatter in Toronto about how Saturday’s fourth quarter saw Raptors all-star Kyle Lowry take a dive worthy of the Olympic platform. Lowry’s Louganis-worthy piece of performance art fooled the referees into whistling Iman Shumpert for an offensive foul, even though video replay suggested Shumpert was guilty only of setting a legal screen. And how does one explain the sheer disparity in the number of fouls levied in the series?
Consider that Cleveland was the vastly superior team in blowouts in Games 1 and 2. The more aggressive team, the superior team, usually gets the better end of any given whistle, even if Saturday was an exception.
“As I grow up and I start understanding basketball in a different way, I believe that refs are . . . going through the same process we are (as players),” Scola said. “We’re trying to play very well for our coaches to play us more, for our contracts to be bigger, for fans to like us. (Referees) go through the same process. There’s a lot of people watching them. They review each one of the plays. They get punishment for bad calls. They get rewarded for good calls. Their contracts are on the line. The amount of games they call are on the line.
“They want to make the right call. Are they going to make mistakes? No question.”
In a bang-bang game that’s played in a blur, they’re going to make mistakes. And they’re going to be unsure, which is why fans cry injustice and coaches lobby and players sell calls.
“Everybody sells calls,” Carroll said. “But when we got to the playoffs, our guys haven’t been selling calls as much as they did (in the regular season) because we don’t get ’em. We learned that in the first series. They’re not going to give us those calls. But they give certain people certain calls.”
Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. But here’s what we know for sure: Three games into the Eastern final, the officials have ignited incalculable outrage while determining precisely zero outcomes.