04.03
Well-respected Raptors assistant general manager Maurizio Gherardini has been linked to the vacant GM post in Milwaukee.
Gherardini has also been influential in the Raptors signing Anthony Parker, who played in Israel, Spaniard Jorge Garbajosa and the trade for Slovenian Rasho Nesterovic from San Antonio.
For what it’s worth, the Raptors are expected to file an official protest to the NBA’s league offices, perhaps as early as today, in the wake of a late-game sequence that deprived the Raptors of a win and of clinching a post-season berth.
For the past seven-odd years, the NBA has had game officials wear a precision timing pack to eliminate any perception of home-court bias.
One of Mark Wunderlich, Jack Nies or Eric Lewis appeared to have started the clock prematurely.
When the officials huddled to review the play, all they did was confirm the ball not leaving Ford’s hands in time.
The question, though, is whether the clock started on time.
The timing system is designed to identify the official who started the clock.
"I thought the basket was good,” Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell said. "And the official called it good.
"It looked like an early clock to me."
Mitchell’s assertion was verified when he gathered his staff post-game inside the locker room to review the play on video.
"Whatever complaint we can file, we’ll do that and leave it to the powers that be,” he said.
"We really shouldn’t have been in this situation at the end of the game,” Chris Bosh said. "With a 17-point lead, we knew they’d make a run.
"When you’re on the road playing in a tough environment, you have to execute."
Colangelo, speaking over the line from Toronto late last night, said it wouldn’t be clear until this morning whether the Raptors would have an avenue for a protest. But Colangelo said he saw what anyone who watched the replay saw: That when Ford caught the ball – at the instant the clock was supposed to start – the time had already run down to 0.4 seconds. So while the referees were correct that Ford didn’t beat the buzzer, the buzzer, it appears, sounded a beat too soon.
"The clock clearly started before he touched it," said Colangelo. "The fact that this happened in Atlanta … it’s just absolutely inexcusable."
Still, it’s unknown who actually started the clock at the moment in question last night. Each of the three referees is equipped with a belt pack outfitted with a button that starts the clock. The timekeeper, a Hawks team employee, also has the power to start time. The first one to hit the button triggers the countdown.
And therein lies the rub of a possible protest. The rulebook says the clock is to start when the ball is touched in bounds, but exactly when the ball is touched is a judgment call.
How could they not grab a rebound? Why didn’t they foul Bibby and put him on the line for two shots, before he launched the three-pointer that tied it? And why couldn’t they rise to the occasion in overtime as Atlanta, which got 28 points from Joe Johnson, ran away?
"We can complain about the clock as much as we want," said Colangelo, "but I think we have to stare ourselves in the mirror. . . . The disappointment comes in blowing a 17-point lead in a game we clearly should have won."
Until their collapse, there were reasons for April optimism. Ford was as good as he’s been since he was removed from Philips Arena on a stretcher back in December, racking up 23 points and 13 assists in 32 minutes. When you tacked on Jose Calderon’s blazingly efficient work, Toronto’s two-headed point guard had a 23-assist evening.
And Andrea Bargnani, in a rare flash of comprehension, actually keyed his great shooting night by attacking the basket, pouring in 17 points all-told by mixing a rare tip-in and a dunk with his usual diet of jump shots.
How in the world did Mike Bibby get so open at the end of regulation? How could T.J. Ford simply lose one of two legitimate three-point shooters on the court? It wasn’t as if he ran into some Oakley-esque screen, he just lost the guy. And that token defence? Disgraceful. Not sure if there was enough time to foul but even if there wasn’t, half-turning away while waving an arm? Brutal. If Ford’s even close, he wraps Bibby up the minute he catches the ball. I know Sam Mitchell, I know how he coaches and I can absolutely assure you he wanted a foul. They had Moon and Delfino and Parker in the game with Bosh and Ford, not sure they’ve got five better guys to defend at that point. It just took more effort than they got from Ford.
Twenty points? 20! That’s more than a team has ever scored against a Raptor team in an overtime period. Considering 25 is the most scored ever by a team in an overtime, that’s another disgrace. Defence has never been this team’s strong suit but that’s an abomination by any standards.
Well, the Raptors were in the bonus with 7:30 to go in the fourth quarter. After Bosh made two free throws on that fifth team foul, they didn’t shoot a single foul shot the rest of the way. Not one.
I imagine there will be calls and e-mails and tapes sent to the league, I also imagine nothing will be done about it. And, please, don’t bring anti-Canada or anti-Toronto into this, okay? That makes people look foolish.
Sometimes, crap happens. It sucks, but they’re human and humans make mistakes. You know, like losing Mike Bibby with the game on the line, giving up 20 points in five overtime minutes and forgetting to drive to the basket.
"I don’t know what to say," Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell said. "It looked like an early clock to me. When we go in the room and look at it, it seemed like when T.J. caught the ball, four-tenths of a second was already gone. And the clock shouldn’t have started until he actually touched the basketball. Before he had touched it, the clock had started.
"They called the basket good [before the review]. Whatever complaint is possible, I’m sure we’re going to do that, then it’s up to the powers that be."
Mitchell said the officials called the basket good on the floor. "So the issue is: Did the clock start early?" he said.
"It’s actually the first time we’ve run that," said Ford, who scored 23 points. "It worked to perfection … but as you know, it didn’t count."
Ford said the crowd reaction warned him that it might be disallowed.
"I’m sure you’ve heard it by now, if you can catch and shoot in point-3 and you can’t catch and drop it in in point-5, you know that’s something you’ve got to ask," said Raptors forward Chris Bosh, who scored 24 points.
Last season in Atlanta, the Raptors were denied two points when a basket by Ford was not added in for some reason. "We’ve got to do something about this," Bosh said. "Last year, they didn’t add [two] points, and this year they start the clock early. We lose both games. It’s not okay, but I mean you just have to take it. I mean, it’s over. Atlanta played hard, we played hard. We obviously had the play. We drew it up the right way in the last second and it should have counted.
"I don’t think they expected it. T.J., he did a good job with his concentration and everything. What’s the rule? Point-3 you can get a shot off, and we couldn’t get a shot off in point-5 seconds. It doesn’t make sense. Do the math."
"I would like to think that with point-5 seconds left and the guy catches an alley-oop and doesn’t do anything fancy with the ball, just catches it and drops it in," said Anthony Parker, who scored 12 points. "I thought it was good."
But as Ford mentioned, the lead was lost, and he said, "We put ourselves in that situation."
"We knew they were going to make a run," Parker said. "We had some opportunities to try to distance ourselves and put the game away."
"We tried to make them shoot threes," Mitchell said. "We knew that Josh Smith had not been shooting the ball well. So we tried to make him beat us and he did."
Kapono’s avoidance of the three-point line is getting ridiculous. Late in the third quarter he cuts to the ball but never steps outside the line. He catches it and of course Bibby is right on him. So he pump fakes, dribbles and draws a charge. It seems so crazy. If he catches the ball outside the line only good things happen: 1) Bibby is a step further away, and Kapono is open for a three, which seems to be the whole point. 2) Bibby is still tight and now the floor is spread, leaving more room for his teammates or more room for Kapono to make a play with his dribble before running into traffic. 3) It allows him the option of pump-faking and taking a side-step while still outside the line. Peja does this all the time. The minute a 50-per-cent three-point shooter steps inside the line, the defence has done his job. Kapono not running outside the line for the catch is like a wide-receive running a nine-yard out when you need 10 yards for a first down.
Ford was at his freewheeling best, especially in the third quarter. He was in tune with his teammates as the Raptors had to go out of their way to miss a shot. Ford threw alley-oop passes on two consecutive possessions, including one that will find its way onto highlight reels everywhere thanks to Jamario Moon’s reverse finish.
Ford also hit a crucial running jump shot in the lane in the fourth quarter, extending Toronto’s lead to three after the Hawks had whittled it down to one.
One unidentified member of the Raptors’ traveling party said it best, “It was going to be a close call either way. But we blew another double-digit lead, gave them three chances to tie the game in regulation and then couldn’t contain them in the overtime. So did we really deserve to win this game?”
That’s open for debate. And if the roles were reversed, the Hawks would also be creaming REDRUM! So it’s hard to dismiss it as just a regrettable error. But what else can you do? Nobody wants to see another one of those epic replay games … at least I don’t.
The worst part is that the finish obscures what was a huge night for the Hawks, who inched closer to their first playoff berth in years and who actually are closer now to the three-team cluster in fifth place than they are to the struggling crews holding down the ninth spot in the Eastern Conference playoff chase.
So how do things look, overall? I like the order to finish Toronto-Philly-Washington. This basically eliminates Washington from the playoffs – they’re good, but not Detroit Basketball good. It delivers a tough match-up for the Raptors against LeBron James and company, and Toronto would have to shoot the lights out for seven games to stand a real chance. Philly would then get Orlando, a match-up they may like. Iguodala can handle one of Rashard Lewis or Hedo Turkoglu on defense and the 76ers rank ahead of the Magic in rebounding rate and defensive efficiency, though they trail offensively.
Let’s talk about defense, do we have the personnel to be good at defending the perimeter? Jamario Moon, Carlos Delfino and Anthony Parker are capable defenders who can keep their man in front of them. They each have their issues with strength (Moon), lateral quickness (Parker) but they can be qualified as good overall defenders. However, they keep finding themselves in positions where they are destined to fail. Take Delfino’s soft-double on Smith in the fourth quarter which allowed Bibby to make a key three – did he not realize that leaving Bibby open is suicide? How many transition threes did Johnson and Bibby hit today? Were Parker and TJ just being lazy in closing them out? My point is that while we don’t have the greatest defensive players on this team, give the athleticism and quickness of some of the players on this team, we should be better. Rebounding is another matter all together.
Yes the clock started early and ruined one of the few great plays Sam Mitchell has diagrammed all season but it should never of come down to that. Almost every Raptor who touched the floor tonight had a great statistical game and they were almost to 100 by the end of the third. But just like some many times this season the defense fell apart in the fourth and the threes starting raining down for the home team. I don’t really want the Raps to catch Washington anyways but that one hurt, it hurt bad.
However, it should not have got to that point. The Raptors took an 11 point lead into the 4th, and true to form, Smitch didn’t have the write people out on the floor when all 37 people in the stadium knew the Hawks were going to make a push for the game.
To compound this, he went small ball. He went small ball against a long-athletic team. I mean Rasho, who was having his way in the paint, didn’t get into the 4th until about 5 minutes left in the game. The Raptors haven’t enjoyed any success playing small ball all year. I don’t get it.
Why not make the Hawks adjust to us? Rasho had 19 points in only 24 minutes heading into the 4th, so why sit him when the Hawks clearly couldn’t deal with him? Grrr….figures Smitch makes a stupid decision like that, but then draws up a great out of bounds play.
Welcome to the Dinosty’s first ever live blog! Basically, it means instead of writing down my game notes and assembling them into a post-game article, they’re going to be posted without the benefit of editing or further thought. Mostly, what this means is that it’ll likely suck. But if it doesn’t suck, then I’m rich, right? RICH!!
(I sssaaaiiiddd, RICH!)
In the NBA … it does not matter how well a certain player performs for the remainder of a specific game … if that same player either (i) makes a crucial error(s) in judgment or is taken advantage of, on the defensive end of the floor, by the opposition during a (critical) game-deciding possession(s).
The fact is … officials do not Win or Lose games in the sport of basketball.
The people who run MLSE have no idea what it takes to build a championship team, either in the NHL or the NBA. MLSE knows how to do one thing exceptionally well … make $$$ … but they do not know what they’re doing when it comes to building a championship pro sports franchise.
Donnie Walsh’s move to the run the New York Knicks … means that the window of opportunity which once existed in Toronto for the Raptors … with Chris Bosh … is closing.
Another name that has been bouncing around a little is that of Raptors assistant GM Maurizio Gherardini. To tell you the truth, I don’t think this rumor has any legs. Apparently Gery Woefel mentioned his name on WSSP, and this got back to the Toronto Sun.
However, Gherardini has only worked for the Raptors for two seasons, and thus has spent relatively little time actually involved with American players (besides those who weren’t quite good enough for the NBA and were looking to play in Italy). Also, being successful as the GM of a team like Benneton isn’t all that impressive — most European leagues are set up so that the teams with the most free-spending owners are able to set up Yankees-style juggernaunts that result in championships usually being distributed among the same three or four teams every year.
Maybe my ugly-American bias is showing, but I can’t really see how Gherardini would have the familiarity with American players or the connections with other front-office members to be an effective GM. I’m sure he’s a great guy to have around for his insights on European players, though.
The question: If the league indeed decides the clock was started early (by a ref with a control on his belt), should this 0.5 seconds be replayed? Or should the league grant Toronto the two points and the win? It isn’t like the buzzer affected Atlanta’s (awful) defense on the play. The clock affected nothing except whether the basket counts or not.
So, what a surprise it was to see T.J. Ford coming out to guard Bibby on the inbound – smallest guy on the court guarding another small guy to prevent a three-pointer. Turns out that cost them the game.
When the inbound play started, Atlanta set screens in the lane for Joe Johnson, trying to free him on the ball side.
All that action in front of the ball left Mike Bibby isolated on the opposite side. When the play started, Bibby made a cut straight up to the wing, Ford gping with him. But, then Ford turned his head to sneak a peak at the ball and all the action going on behind him. When Bibby saw that, he raced to the corner and caught the pass.
Ford recovered and was right there, but he wanted to make sure he didn’t foul on the shot, and his length wasn’t enough to bother Bibby – who nailed the three to tie the game with 0.5. If that is a taller defender, that becomes a tougher shot and more likely a miss.
No Comment.
Add Your Comment