No consistency.

The refs enforce fouls/rules differently all the time. A whistle for bigs and another for guards/wings. Variance between the regular season and the playoffs. Stars and elite defenders get more leeway. Then they dont enforce flopping or jumping into defenders.

Adam Silvers goal has been to increase revenue. TV deals, expansion, play in, tanking (more ticket sales). But every week we have someone going viral due to the refs. This week it was Booker and Finch, we still have four more days of games.

Turns out the oligarchs benefitting from corruption don’t give a shit until it impacts them!

Root of issue IMO is the different whistles for star players vs non star players. You’ll see SGA get soft calls in his favor and then Dort fighting people and getting away it on other end.

The funny thing is they actually made new rules to address some of the issues. They just randomly decided not to actually use or enforce any of those new rules properly.

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Honestly with modern social media there will always be conspiracy theories unless they miss 0 calls social media has ensured that there will be mass negativity towards basically anything

I don’t remember a year where everyone was happy with the officiating people claim it was so much better in the past but then you have stuff like the 2002 WCF and the 2006 Finals

mlb has been making rule changes and has surpassed the nba.

NBA needs to talk about officiating and pace of the game changes.

This is the one place in life I want ai to replace the workers.

It might be interesting if players backed Booker up. I know it’s hard because so many are competing..but a co-sign by Steph and others who are respected league wide might push the conversation further.

Everyone knows what Devin said is true (besides some OKC fans) and the most important element is the integrity game comments.

The league has actively contributed to the officiating problem as well.

Look at the Kawhi-Zaza rule and how that was immediately abused, and then it took MULTIPLE seasons to fix because for some reason the league couldn’t just put the hammer down on behavior that obviously degraded the viewing experience.

The image of Kent Bazemore kicking his feet out sideways will still forever be burned into my brain.

But hey, didn’t you hear, our boy Silver said they’re actually going to paint the finals logo at center court for the finals again finally!

Instead they made is legal to push off this year. They intentionally made it worse.

The officiating has literally been the number 1 story this playoffs. After every single game this subreddit, media pundits, and other social medias all explode pointing to and giving example of the refs being absolutely TERRIBLE at their jobs.

People are not talking about Lebron having a good game, SGA having a good game, or Deni having a bad game. They are talking about the reffing. As they should be. Booker put it perfectly. It’s getting to the point where the NBA is going to start being viewed in the same lens as the WWE

Ishbia has been a pretty good owner besides making that terrible Beal trade tbh. He’s probably not a great person because of, y’know, billionaires, but objectively speaking he’s done more good for the NBA in terms of just business practices than harm afaik

People complain all the time about how The League needs to take action on all kinds of things. The League does whatever its owners want it to do - it should be huge news that here we have an owner publicly calling out their league for a serious, controversial league issue (and overall, encouraging that we have an owner bluntly identifying and making noise about the officiating problems).

Redditors hates billionaires

The top like 15+ comments are all in agreement with it lmfao

Ishbia will be crazy fined for this.

If Ballmer said it, the league would say “sawry 👉😓👈

Completely reasonable statement

true but ur acting like every sports league doesnt have gambling ads now

“The appearance of the law must be upheld. Especially when it’s being broken.”

Tony Brothers is my least favorite- That guy thinks he’s in the league, he thinks he’s a star player.

I’ve literally never seen another sports officials look so fucking indignant and self righteous when delivering a call that they were OBVIOUSLY wrong on

because they never get punished for their mistakes

Having watched Toumani Camara’s offensive foul drawing prowess all year, there was one game where the refs clearly said “we’re not giving him anything tonight!” Scott Foster was the crew chief, believe it or not.

Remind us what happened last year with Finch and his complaints to the media?

It’s not blown out of proportion. Just tune into one OKC game and you’ll see BS within 3 minutes

As a casual fan of the last few years it’s definitely making it hard to fully sink my teeth into the sport and it’s totally difficult to watch OKC at all

Sad bc they used to be one of my faves to watch as a neutral fan 10 yrs ago

It’s unbelievable to me that NBA refs are still getting fooled by Lu Dort flopping on screens. It’s like there’s no effort to learn anything. He does it all the time and he very frequently gets the call, and every time the replay shows it’s a bad one.

This is exactly it! Just call it the same way for both teams

Players gotta reimburse the late fees to show how loyal they are

You remember when Mat Ishbia flopped in game 4 vs the Nuggets back in 2023?

Obviously the Booker/KD/Beal was disasterclass team building, but I will never shit on an owner who is willing to spend money to win

The fucks the point of owning a sport team for penny pinching? Go invest in stocks or some shit and be better off financially for it

He’s had his negative moments, but overall I’m so hyped to have him as our owner. He cares and that’s all I could ask for

That’s the biggest issue. If SGA just had a good whistle while the opponent had an average whistle, people would still complain but it wouldn’t be so constant. Plenty of players are able to draw fouls.

However, the reality is that SGA (and the rest of OKC) have a good whistle on offense and the opponent has a BAD whistle on offense, making the officiating gap bigger.

Yes this is the biggest issue. Most of the fouls on sga are in fact fouls by the rule book. But on the other hand, players on the other team will get fouled in the same way or worse and they don’t get called, either because they didn’t flop so the ref doesn’t see, or the ref sees and decides they don’t like them.

Yeah but they even have biases there. I’m always amazed how much they let Draymond get away with when talking to them. He’ll be right up in their face yelling as loud as he can and they don’t give him another tech. Then you’ll have instances where a role player says one thing as they’re running down the court and it’s a tech. It is disrespectful for Draymond to treat refs that way but they have the power to change that. Instead they swallow their whistles and call the non-stars for minor things

100% agree - as bad as the officiating is (and my god do I hate the foul baiting and superstar whistle, non-calls on push offs, egregious moving screens and just generally unevenly called games. I don’t want to watch a free throw-a-thon) it’s equally annoying to watch EVERY CALL be argued and bitched about - sometimes a real foul happens, it’s okay to tap your chest and move on

As someone who has to read a litany of chatGPT bullshit everyday at work, this does not read like AI whatsoever. The only thing would be the use of dashes, but GPT doesn’t use them like that - they use them like this.

Very reminiscent of soccer/futbol before VAR. The sport loves the Drama!

The foul called on Gillespie for Chet’s shot is even worse, Chet wasn’t even looking at the basket and motion was unnatural as hell

One of the stupidest calls one will ever seen in basketball.

I get missing a call or a bad call in a split second decision.

This one was like oh yeah that guy dived for the ball and threw it off the other player to maintain possession - I do need to call a tech don’t I. let me call a tech on a play that’s known even at the middle school level

That’s a great point — not only are you innovating, but you’re really thinking like a problem solver here! Let’s break down how that would work…

I’ll never forget game 4 of the NBA finals last year. Pacers were hot , OKC was cold, and  the refs kept OKC in the game. Couldn’t have OKC go down 3-1. 

Legitimate fouls should be based on the same criteria as the other end of the court, which is mine (and many others) issue. Sure there is contact on almost all of shais fouls. Sure refs are going to miss calls, make mistakes, etc. IMO that still doesn’t account for how physical most okc players are allowed to play when on the other end Shais defenders are penalized.

Rich people hire ghostwriters for social post is nothing new. However, an owner DECIDING to post something like this is a pretty big deal. Interesting how Adam Silver is going to deal with all this when some of his clients are clearly unhappy about the referees.

100% is, no publicist would approve an owner bashing refs 

I can see Ishbia writing this himself

The other bad call was a Brooks/Dort double tech bc they… stood next to each other. Honestly might be worse than the Booker tech

Chet badly flopped for a foul and the refs bought it in the first q

Chet got 2 fts jumped into gillespie not even facing the basket

Hartenstein flopping to draw an offensive foul on maluach

Those were the 3 most egregious ones

There was a pretty egregious push off and flop. Chet flopping on Ighodaro, Shai with his push offs.

What? I think people just want to see fairly officiated games…

Respect for the response. Most Thunder fans don’t see it that way

Yep, if the refs just let these teams play, Thunder still easily win but at least it is much more enjoyable to watch.

That doesn’t make sense. The Thunder do not have a positive free throw differential, if they’re allowed to foul the other team is too.

You can’t say “the other team can’t touch them” when OKC consistently shoots fewer free throws.

Such a dumb narrative.