It was amazing even at the time. Rodman, Sheed and AI. Historic run. We’ll never see its like again, league is gentrified now.

If I remember it right, part of the Donaghy scandal was that the refs had a deal where the first ref to give a tech to Rasheed didn’t have to pay for dinner.

Draymond eat your heart out mate

And that was a much rougher era in general. He still stood out.

About half of those were total bullshit, too. He was getting tee’d up for shit that even in today’s game, especially for stars, would have just been a stiff walkaway from the ref. 

Some officials just straight up did not like him, and it was 100% personal. Now, when you factor in that some of those officials were straight up CORRUPT, with one in particular getting CONVICTED for it, well…

I wonder how many points he was directly responsible for giving away at the free throw line

He also received a 7 game suspension for threatening a ref off court in 2003. He def had anger issues.

BALL DONT LIE

I loved Sheed. Some of his techs were very much deserved and some were likely given because he called out refs for being biased.

Dude got into it with Tim Donaghy on more than a few occasions, once almost physically. So maybe there’s some cause to him going after them, but at the same time, the refs may have given him techs way more easily than other players as payback.

By about halfway through that season, it was pretty clear that he was not playing with a full deck.

Sheed had a special thing of annoying every single referee, sometimes for no reason - to the point where the referees actively hunted for ways to get him out. He got a technical for looking at a referee weird. Like, cmon, this is also against the rules, if you’re on such an ego trip to give a player a technical for such a petty reason.

He loved arguing though, a great player and also very entertaining when he was arguing.

Self fulfilling prophecy at a certain point

Assuming opposing teams shot 81% on the technical free throws (which is roughly the league average on such shots), he cost his team about 33 points on technical fouls alone. That’s about 0.4 additional opponent points per game, due solely to Sheed’s raging temper. On a WAR basis, this is the equivalent of roughly 1 win.

If Sheed had kept himself in check and not gotten any techs, that alone would have been enough for Portland to leapfrog the Dallas Mavericks and Philadelphia 76ers to go from 6th up to 4th on average margin of victory. Portland finished the year with an average of margin of 4.20 points, while Dallas and Philly both ended at 4.28.

Stats don’t lie!

He must be loud

To be fair, he was pretty much energized by technicals