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Wednesday, April 2, 2008
NOT AGAIN!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
PHILIPS ARENA - As John McEnroe once said, “You cannot be serious!”
That’s what I was saying to myself Wednesday night as the Hawks put the finishing touches on the Toronto Raptors for their fifth straight win.
Not another controversial finish.
For those of you that didn’t watch, this is how it went down:
Down 107-104 with 11.5 seconds to play in regulation, the Hawks get three chances to tie the game and after missed 3-pointers from both Mike Bibby and Joe Johnson, Josh Childress finds Bibby in the corner on an inbounds plays and Bibby drains the shot with .5 of a second to send force overtime. But on the ensuing play, the Raptors somehow sneak T.J. Ford behind the Hawks’ defense and he grabs a lob in the air and lays it in at the buzzer to win the game for the Raptors. Only, he didn’t get the shot off in time (a fact the officials had to clarify via replay). But what they didn’t catch was their own error tenths of a second before that, when the clock started before Ford touched that lob.
There will for sure be an official protest from the Raptors, victims of statistical misfortune for the second time on a trip here (you remember last year’s game where Ford wasn’t credited for a shot in a game that the Raptors went on to lose).
And just like the Miami game earlier this year, there was clearly an error made. Only this time it’s not on the Hawks but on the game officials (wonder how David Stern’s going to rule on this one, ha).
One unidentified member of the Raptors’ traveling party said it best, “It was going to be a close call either way. But we blew another double-digit lead, gave them three chances to tie the game in regulation and then couldn’t contain them in the overtime. So did we really deserve to win this game?”
That’s open for debate. And if the roles were reversed, the Hawks would also be creaming REDRUM! So it’s hard to dismiss it as just a regrettable error. But what else can you do? Nobody wants to see another one of those epic replay games … at least I don’t.
The worst part is that the finish obscures what was a huge night for the Hawks, who inched closer to their first playoff berth in years and who actually are closer now to the three-team cluster in fifth place than they are to the struggling crews holding down the ninth spot in the Eastern Conference playoff chase.
Josh Smith sank those two huge 3-pointers (hate him or love him, the kid is fearless and brings that extra something to the table that few players his size on the planet can) and played fantastic defense on Chris Bosh down the stretch. Bibby was as clutch as ever. And Joe Johnson did his usual, as did Childress, Marvin Williams and Al Horford.
Instead of celebrating this win and what it means, there’s going to be a lot of teeth-gnashing from here to Toronto Thursday, wondering what, if anything, will be done about this game.
