From stein...
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playof...hyStern-080611
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This is the only sports league in America in which it's a routine reaction by folks on the inside as well as the outside to respond to bitter defeat with charges of biased refereeing or outright game-rigging. It's a massive problem magnified by the fact that no one I've encountered in 15 years of covering the league is overflowing with suggestions for how to stop such perceptions from mushrooming any further, let alone for how to put a halt to them.
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He couldn't be more on-target. It's a ritual that after you've gotten the wrong end of the reffing, that you go on tv and tell the refs how bad it was. And usually it gets fixed, it really does.
I don't recall if Avery was smart enough to actually openly talk about the ref reeming that the mavs got, I seem to remember him jumping on a reporter instead and being cute. Phil Jackzen wisely just said it and he got better reffing.
Another one from this stein..
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As my ESPN colleague Michael Wilbon recently wrote in The Washington Post: "The larger point here is that nobody has ever known what is and what isn't a foul in professional basketball. … It's as subjective as anything in sports, calling a foul. You can't get a consensus from people who've been in and around the game for 100 years."
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Lord have mercy isn't that the truth. I'm sitting at the areana with my buddy and other folks who've come in for a casual first time game. They turn to me a complete stranger and say..."what, what was that". I have to just shrug and say, I don't know, I truly don't . I can see it on the replay 10 times and I still dont' know, OBVIOUSLY the ref didn't SEE that either because it didn't happen, but he imagined it. I shrug my shoulders and go on.
I'm starting to feel like a chump.