Orlando-Detroit Disputed Shot Discussion (Get Rid of Tenths of Seconds!), And Why The Lakers-Jazz Series is FAR From Over
Quick-hitters:
- OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!! Eddie Izzard is going to be at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood from Thursday to Saturday, Aug 7-9!
MUST…GET…TIX!
The new show is called “Stripped,” for the record.
- I made some instant udon noodles for dinner tonight, and the cooking instructions said to boil 19 1/2 fl oz. of water (17.5 fl oz. if I chose to cook the noodles in the microwave).
19.5 fl oz? They couldn’t round it up to 2 1/2 cups? Too bad I don’t have a graduated cylinder. And what’s with directing me to cook the noodles for 5 minutes? Four minutes and 48 seconds would have been perfect.
- I forgot to mention one incident that happened during the Mets-Dodgers game last night. A woman wearing a Mets jersey was leaving the stadium, but not before getting into a mini-argument with a bunch of Dodger fans sitting a few rows in front of us. As soon as that happened, a bunch of Dodger fans started mercilessly booing her.
She turned around, and started speaking what could barely be considered English. I was able to make out something about “you” (Dodger fans, presumably) winning twice in “like a hundred years” while “we” (Mets fans) have won “so many” times.
If memory serves me correctly, the Los Angeles Dodgers have won two championships in their non-Brooklyn existence, and the Mets have won exactly twice as well. Now, if the woman is going to bandwagon and include the Yankees into that discussion, then I guess she has a point. Then again, including Yankees’ championships as a Mets fan is like being a Clipper fan celebrating Lakers’ championships.
I couldn’t help but join in on the heckling, shouting “Remember September of last year?” (in reference to the Mets’ late season collapse last year that cost them the NL East).
- I never did get around to commenting about the disputed shot in the third quarter of Game 2 between Orlando and Detroit, so I’ll let the guys over at Imaginary Hardwood explain why the disputed shot—a terrible mistake by the refs and clock operator, for the record—wasn’t the only reason for Orlando’s 2-0 deficit.
I’ll add this to the discussion, though: why couldn’t the refs start the entire play over again? Reset the clock, and make Detroit bring the ball back up court? What is wrong with that? And I don’t want to hear the nonsense that the refs “knew” that 4.6 seconds (or whatever it was) elapsed from inbounds to shot, thus allowing the basket to stand. Yeah, I’m so sure the refs knew that 4.6, and not 4.5 or 4.7 seconds, ran off the clock. I would have respected their opinion, as wrong as it ended up being, if they had said that five seconds ran off the clock.
ESPN’s TMQ has ranted about tenths of seconds often, and I wholeheartedly agree. Sure, without tenths of seconds, Laker fans might not have Derek Fisher’s “0.4″ shot, but with the proposal I will offer below, he might have had “more” time to take that shot.
I propose that the NBA should get rid of the clock readings of tenths of seconds. If they insist on having fractions of seconds, why not use half-seconds instead?
(Try this exercise: randomly start and stop a stopwatch, and guess how much time elapsed for five trials of varying durations, to the nearest tenth. Now, repeat the trial, and see how many you can get to the nearest half-second. I tried it just right now, and scored 1/5 on the first test; 3/5 on the second test. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that one is probably going to score better on the second test.)
Wouldn’t identifying “five and a half seconds” make a lot more sense than trying to determine if 5.3 or 5.4 seconds ran off the clock instead?
- Despite getting out to a big double-digit lead early, and keeping it for most of the game, I still saw a lot of chinks in the Lakers’ armor after their Game 2 win over Utah. Deron Williams was an absolute beast in the third quarter, and Paul Millsap might be the key to Utah evening the series in the next two games. I could’ve sworn that every basket Millsap scored was an and-1. If Carlos Boozer and Andrei Kirilenko were able to give the Jazz anything decent in the first two games, this series could easily be 1-1 or 2-0, Utah.
Fisher was huge, Gasol was solid—and I think the Lakers need to establish him more often—and Odom was great. Even still, the third-quarter stretch where both teams were scoring on practically every possession has to be worrisome to the Lakers; you better believe that the Jazz will get stops in Utah. I don’t expect the Lakers to shoot 57% in either Games 3 or 4.
I missed most of the bore-fest that was Detroit-Orlando, but hopefully Chauncey Billups is able to play Game 4. If he’s not, Detroit is going to be in for one heck of a series.
Until next time!