Knicks should be crying foul after Game 3
Knicks guard Josh Hart questions a call with referee Kevin Scott during the first half of Game 3 against the Pacers on Friday in Indianapolis. Credit: AP/Michael Conroy
INDIANAPOLIS
Well, it worked.
All the whining. All the finger-pointing. All the complaining about how “small-market teams” don’t get a fair shake.
It may have cost Pacers coach Rick Carlisle $35,000, but it appears he did manage to get inside the head of the officials.
At least that’s how it appeared to more than one Knick and possibly their coach after their injury-depleted team suffered a 111-106 loss to the Pacers in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series on Friday night.
The officiating didn’t lose the game for the Knicks, but it certainly did help swing the momentum in the Pacers’ direction late in the game. With the score tied at 102, Myles Turner was credited with a block on Josh Hart’s fast-break layup attempt with 2:03 left
. The ball appeared to hit the backboard before Turner blocked it.
“I know it was a goaltend. I saw it,” Hart said.
The block set up a driving layup by the Pacers’ Andrew Nembhard, and the Knicks would never lead again. The Pacers trail 2-1 in the series, with Game 4 on Sunday.
Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau was asked if he thought the officiating was even.
“From my vantage point, [some] calls could have gone our way,” he said. “But I’m not going to comment until I look at the film. We just have to find a way to win. That’s the bottom line.”
Referee Kevin Scott seemed to be the cause of most of the Knicks’ frustration, though no one outright named him, wanting to avoid a fine. Several times, players were seen trying to talk to Scott and he looked right through them.
“I think what was tough for us was one of [the officials] wasn’t approachable,” Hart said. “In a playoff game, the rules are sometimes, you want to see what they interpret and what they see the foul, so you know how they are calling it. One wasn’t approachable at all. So that was tough for us. Just because we couldn’t see where we were wrong and where we fouled and what we could have done better. That was the only tough part. But it’s not on them. We had plenty of chances to win the game.”
The win came 10 hours after the NBA fined Carlisle for opening his postgame news conference after Game 2 with a rant that took issue with the officiating, intimating that Hart had been dirty in an interaction with Tyrese Haliburton and promoting the theory that the NBA is prejudiced against small-market teams.
The aim, of course, was to influence the way Game 3 was officiated.
Before the game, Hart called Carlisle’s actions “disrespectful.”
“Rick’s saying whatever he feels. It has nothing to do with us. But at the end of the day, I think it’s pretty disrespectful to us,” Hart said. “Because at the end of the day, we’re out there competing and playing at a high level. It’s not about officiating. It’s not about anything like that. For him to discredit how we’re playing, I feel like that’s pretty disrespectful.”
In his rant, Carlisle took issue with Hart for “shoving” Haliburton in the back when “the whole world knows that Haliburton’s got a bad back.” While there was clear contact from behind when Hart was chasing after him, Haliburton never lost the ball, and no call was made.
“If you look, I hit the ball. Might I have bumped him a little bit? Yeah, I’m running full speed,” Hart said. “He’s running full speed and he’s in front of me. I’m trying to make a play on the ball.”
Carlisle submitted 78 calls from the first two games for the league to review and publicly asserted that “small-market [teams] deserve a fair shot no matter where they’re playing.”
It’s certainly true that a final four of Minnesota, Oklahoma City, Indiana and Cleveland would be a ratings nightmare, but no one is buying the notion that there is a league-wide conspiracy to keep small-market teams out.
Carlisle, his pockets $35,000 lighter, softened his tone in his pregame news conference on Friday but still managed to get his point across when asked what his reaction was to the fine. “I’m just going to support my players and our fan base and our ownership 100%,” he said before adding that he is done talking about it.
Thibodeau, once the coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, was asked in his pregame news conference if he sees a difference in the way big-market and small-market teams are treated by officials.
“No,” he said with a smile. “[Officiating] is not an easy job. If you just went by how you define what a screen is, you could call a foul on it. Every game, you just want consistency. I don’t care if it’s tight or looser. As long as it’s consistent.”
In Game 3, no one was quite sure that it was.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.