NBA: Taking the Game Back
Posted April 17th, 2007 by George Thomas
By now all sports fans have seen the Tim Duncan video that led to his being ejected from a game by referee Joey Crawford. Duncan has a rep throughout the league of being a whiner, but that's irrelevant in this case.
Crawford stepped across an invisible line in this case making himself part of the game when, as a game official, he shouldn't have been and he will pay the price for that. Suspended indefinitely, Crawford will watch the NBA playoffs (or not) from his recliner at home. It's a suspension that's deserved primarily because he broke a cardinal rule of game officiating. You have to trust me on this. I only pretend to know this because my brother refs high school football. But he refs by the belief that the best game officials are the ones who call fouls, penalties or whatever within the confines of the contests. According to my dear brother Randy you should never know when an official is there. I couldn't agree more.
Crawford's grandstanding likely cost Duncan's team, the San Antonio Spurs. Locked in a fierce battle for the second playoff seed in the Western Conference, the team went on to lose that game against the Dallas Mavericks effectively eliminating any chance Duncan and crew had to grab it.
It's possible that the Spurs would have lost that game with Duncan's imposing presence still in the middle. It's also possible they would have won. The problem is we'll never know because Crawford saw fit to call a couple of petty technical fouls and eject Duncan possibly controlling the outcome of the game. Was Duncan disrespectful at some point? Probably.
But refs like Crawford need to learn that it's the game that matters, not their egos and certainly not the players' egos.
