Wasn’t it a traveling violation ?
Well, I know they won’t call it in the NBA. Not against Tim Duncan. Especially not in the last second of OT on a game tying shot. But still, wouldn’t it be nice if at least someone noticed it ? Yet I heard no mention of it.
And no, it’s not sour grapes. The Suns lost the game themselves somewhere between a 24 seconds shot clock violation, and offensive foul on Amare when he could just take a jumper from 6 feet, a missed layup by Diaw and so on. And the refs rewarding obvious flops (by either team) with offensive foul calls were much more annoying than this. But this still looked to me as a traveling violation that needed to be mentioned. Just watch the clip - at the 52 seconds mark you can see Duncan shuffling his feet before taking the shot. So now I mentioned it.
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:35 am
Not even close to traveling. You don’t seem to be a very sophisticated fan of the game.
All of your opinions are based on a conclusion that you have already reached and then you look for evidence (mostly false) that leads to your preconceived conclusion.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 am
Huh ?? Spurs fan, right ?
You need to read the text again, carefully. I did NOT blame the Suns loss on the refs. I clearly said “The Suns lost the game themselves”. So how did I reach a “preconceived conclusion” ?
If I wanted to blame the refs and then try to find evidence for it, I’d have complained about the flops. And even though everybody in the NBA flops, the Spurs are absolute masters. But flops or no flops, the Suns could have won the game, but made mistake after huge mistake. The traveling of Tim Duncan is just something that I noticed and saw that no one else noticed. That’s all there is to it …
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Well, he plants his right foot, then catches the ball, steps down with his left, then steps again with his right, so technically, it is a travel.
However, given that there’s probably at least one case of this kind of travelling on literally every single possession, it would always be a no call, unless it’s a rookie in his first game or something.
A HUGE number of NBA players travel like this EVERY TIME they drive, by taking their first step with their pivot foot. Most point guards (good fundamentals) and centers (goofy robots programmed by coaches) are pretty good about not travelling, but the majority of the other players seem to have never been coached properly. I guess it doesn’t matter either way, if they’re never gonna get called for it.
Well, unless they want to play in the Olympics or something…
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:43 am
I totally agree with you - if every traveling violation was called, 90% of possessions would end up in turnovers. In fact, I stated that I KNOW this will NEVER be called.
The point that I’m trying to make is that not only Lebron and Wade get “the benefit of the doubt” from the refs. Lebron was called LeTravel and a big deal was made because he traveled on the last shot of a game against the Wiz in last year’s playoffs. These are virtually identical situations: superstar travels on end of game tying/winning basket and is not called. I’m just asking “Where’s the outrage now ?”.