The Lakers - What's to Love?

In an extraordinary move last week, the National Basketball Association actually suspended an official for making a bad call.

I saw the game in question on TV the night of Feb. 25. The official's call was terrible and the outcome of the game was directly impacted by it. The Los Angeles Lakers won when they should have lost to the host Denver Nuggets. I'll take up the issue of the Lakers, the unsavory culture of that team and its impact on officials, later on in this story. For now, I'll focus on the game and the call.

Up by one with less than 10 seconds left, the Nuggets had possession and took as much time off the clock as possible before putting up a shot. The shot clock expired and the buzzer sounded as the ball was in the air. The ball clearly nicked the rim and the Nuggets' Carmelo Anthony grabbed the rebound cleanly and had possession.

The Nuggets would have run out the final five seconds on the clock and won the game. But an official who was not in a position to see the ball hit the rim raised his right hand over his head and blew his whistle, declaring that the ball had missed the rim and that, therefore, time expired without a legitimate shot being taken, and ordering the ball to be turned over to the Lakers.

Replays of the sequence showed clearly that 1. the ball hit the rim, 2. Anthony had clear possession of the rebound, 3. the official who made the call was on the other side of the court, out of position to see if the ball hit the rim and 4. the official clearly signaled a shot clock violation.

But that's not where the blown call ended. Recognizing the mistake, the game's three officials stopped play and huddled, undoubtedly initiated by the officiating crew's chief.

Their decision, however, was, as the television commentator said, "highway robbery."

Instead of correcting the error by giving the ball to the Nuggets, who had clear possession when the whistle blew, they decided to have a jump ball at mid-court.

That was tantamount to giving the ball to the Lakers, and halfway up the court, to boot. No one on the Nuggets could match up to the Lakers' Shaquille O'Neill on a jump ball, and Shaq made sure of that by slapping the jump ball to a teammate the minute it left the official's hand, not waiting for the ball to elevate as the rules require.

Shaq should have been called for a violation the way he swatted the jump ball, but, of course, there was no whistle.

With less than five seconds to go, the Lakers made a couple passes and hit a shot to win.

In summary, the bad call by the official on the shot clock violation was compounded and made worse by the decision of the entire crew to resolve the matter with a jump ball, rather than giving the ball back to the Nuggets. Then, it was capped with the crew's failure to penalize O'Neill for his infraction on the jump ball.

The officials gave the game to the Lakers, and the NBA blew it by penalizing only the official who made the first bad call. It should have penalized the whole officiating crew, and especially the crew chief responsible for the horrible decision to resolve the mistake clearly in the Lakers' favor.

That brings me to the more general subject of the "Evil Empire," aka the Lakers and their infamous "intimidation factor" on NBA officials.

Playing the Washington Wizards at the MCI Center last Saturday, the Lakers are an even uglier cultural phenomenon when seen up close and personal than they appear to be on TV.

I go to a lot of Wizards games and am an NBA addict when it comes to TV (I subscribe to that special package on Cox Cable that gives me about 10 games a night to chose from). I don't thin I have any personal grudges against the Lakers and have tried hard over the years to appreciate them. But, beyond Jack Nicholson, there's nothing to empathize with. They're disrespectful of their opponents and are thugs and cry babies.

If that doesn't matter to you, and you're just looking for shear talent, then that would be like rooting for the more advanced robot models in the Terminator movie series. If that's what floats your boat, that's OK. It doesn't float mine.

The NBA is full of players with enormous talent, but only the Lakers smirk at and belittle their opponents on the court. When Kobe Bryant thought he was matched up against an inferior Wizard on Saturday, he glanced to his teammates to smirk. Coach Phil Jackson was into this, too. And Shaq. It is a part of the team's culture that I have seen nowhere else.

They're thugs. Yes, Shaq is big and gets bumped a lot. But he dishes it out far more than he takes it. I have never seen players thrown down as violently throughout the course of a game than I did Saturday. The officials call fouls, sometimes. But they let four out of five incidents go. The Lakers come out way ahead.

They're cry babies. I couldn't believe Kobe hopping around the court and waving his hands in the air over one call late in the game when the Lakers had the game in the bag. Kobe revealed an emotional immaturity and petulant insistence on having things his way that undoubtedly spill over into other aspects of his troubled life.

So, take the Lakers, please. Other dynasties are hated for being good, like the Yankees. But nobody says the Yankee players, as individuals, aren't nice guys. That puts the Lakers in a class by themselves, and it's time NBA officials began to stop allowing themselves to be bullied by them.