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Stern Warning to Jeff Van Gundy

© Roy Pickering

According to Houston Rockets coach, Jeff Van Gundy, his team's early departure from the playoffs was in part due to a conspiracy targeting his team's center and resident international superstar, Yao Ming. Jeff's confidential informant advised him that the team of referees working the Rockets-Mavericks playoff series would be taking extra long looks at Ming's on court moves to make sure he wasn't violating any rules of NBA traffic. The instigator of the decision to focus on Ming was Mark Cuban, the rather vocal and limelight seeking owner of the Dallas Mavericks. This tussle for the heart of Texas was already interesting enough on its own merits, with two fairly evenly matched teams going toe to toe. Once Cuban stirred things up and Van Gundy upped the ante, the pens of the media had plenty of extra material to work with. Then David Stern entered the fray and once again lived up to his no nonsense reputation, fining Van Gundy a whopping $100,000 and threatening further disciplinary action once the Rockets' season was over.

It is standard practice for players, coaches, and a few excessively involved team owners to criticize NBA referees. The zebras certainly make plenty of mistakes, although it can reasonably be claimed that they do their job as well as it can be done. With ten athletically gifted pituitary cases running, spinning, leaping, and colliding at full speed while trying to maintain control of a bouncing ball, there are only so many infractions that the human eye will be able to pick up. On the coin's flip side, fouls are often erroneously called when a player has in fact made a perfectly clean play in a blink of those eyes. Instant replay is new to the NBA, and its use is minimal, primarily utilized to determine if shots taken at the end of the shot clock left the shooter's hands in time. There are many other scenarios where referees could review what television cameras have filmed to determine if their all too human judgment calls were accurate or not. Perhaps instant replay will play a greater role in the officiating of NBA games in the future, although one of the most appealing aspects of basketball is the fast pace at which it is played (excluding the final minutes of close games that inevitably become timeout fests), so the rule makers will be careful not to do anything that will slow it down too much.