My brother is a massive Knicks fan so I'm rooting for them.....but man last night was just weird from an officiating standpoint. The Brunson foul being overturned....the phantom kick.....the missed moving screen on Divncenzo and then him getting the benefit of that same call at the end by flopping....just odd.
Any ONE of those calls could MAYBE be seen as a flukey mistake...but all of them together just smells bad. It really does.
I’m a Pacers fan. It really sucks, but it’s not fishy. It’s just that 3 questionable/bad calls all went against Indy in a short period that happened to be at the end of a close game. Chalk it up to officials making calls they shouldn’t be making, calls going in the home team’s favor, and a bad review rule and move on.
The officiating was what it was and the Pacers didn’t adjust, much like Denver didn’t adjust. Switch the officiating crews last night and the games may both had looked different. Brunson kept bulldozing into guys with his elbow extended and head down and getting calls while the crew in the Min/Den game let everything go. Switch it around and those games look different. But Indy just never made an adjustment.
Indy also fouled twice before inbounds leading to technical free throws which is just stupid, so they hurt themselves badly there, especially the one at the end. And with the end of the game playing out the way it did and being so close, that miracle 3 the Knicks hit at the end of the 1st half was just bad luck for Indy.
The bottom line is that the Pacers didn’t play good enough. Haliburton has to be better than 2-6 from the field. A team’s best players have to step up in the playoffs. Brunson did and Haliburton didn’t. If that doesn’t chance, Pacers aren’t going much further regardless.