On Tuesday night, with 0.3 seconds left in the game, and the Chicago Bulls down 90-89 at home versus the Denver Nuggets, Brad Miller put up a quick, fingertip shot from 20 feet. The ball hit the bottom of the net, the crowd went wild, the Bulls won the game. But the fans weren’t walking out of The United Center with smiles on their faces, because the officials, after 10+ minutes of deliberations by watching replay after replay of the shot, decided to waive it off.
That entire night on television, the replays of that shot were continually shown and after careful observation, I concluded that it was too close to call. The referees should of just stuck to the call on the floor, and the Bulls should have been victorious.
This is where replay creates problems for the NBA. It creates a level of unauthentic officiating, where a few video feeds become the ‘evidence’ for a referee to determine a call to be correct. These games, as with all other sports, should have both good and bad calls, and to rely on video replay to determine games, eliminates human error, thus domesticating the game beyond what the fans and the players want.
Some might say that the most important thing is to get the call right, but I disagree. If the official sees the play, calls the call, and it turns out being incorrect, so be it - the game must go on.
In the NBA today, video replay has been utilized to determine if a shot has left the player’s hand in time at the end of quarters, the game, or the shot clock, as shown with Brad Miller’s shot. It’s also used to see if a player was behind the 3-point line when a field goal was made, which players will be ejected when a brawl breaks out, who touched the ball last before it hit the out-of-bounds area, and even if the ball handler committed a backcourt violation.
I’m not happy with these rules because it diminishes the role of the human referee and places more emphasis on a video tape. If the NBA wants to keep replay as a significant facet of the game today, I definitely don’t agree, and I’m pretty sure many other avid NBA fans will side with me.
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