Blazers, George Baily, and board games

One of my favorite movies of all time is "It's a Wonderful Life."  You know the story--George Baily is a good man who falls on bad times and decides everyone in his life is better off without him.  "I wish I'd never been born," he says the Clarence, the bumbling guardian angel who is sent to help him.  Fast-foward.  George Baily is given the opportunity to see what the world would have been like if he had never been born--his mother as a widowed owner of a boarding house, his brother who died as a child because George was not there to save him, and his wife who became an old maid librarian.  Finally Clarence declares, "each man's life affects so many others."

Next, when I was growing up I played Pursue the Pennant baseball board game.  Great game...I sometimes miss those afternoons rolling the dice.  Anyway, there are a multitude of similar baseball board games out there that more or less give people the opportunity to replay seasons with remarkable accuracy based on players real-life statistics.  There is no such similar game for basketball. Why?  A baseball game is divided into hundreds of discrete units--an at-bat by Ichiro, a ground ball to Jeter, a strike out by Sabathia--that can be fairly easily separated and categorized statistically.  This is impossible in basketball where instead of discrete units you have a long interlocking and interwoven thread interactions between various players in various situations.  In basketball a coach can tell his team to let Roy take every shot.  In baseball you can't send Ichiro to the plate every at bat.

Baseball is a deck of cards.  Basektball is the fishing line that you've been trying to untangle for the past three hours and still aren't making any progress.  There is not logical or pre-determined batting order.  Instead each moment feeds into the next and sets the foundation fo what follows.

"So what?" you're thinking.  There has been much talk of the officiating in this series.  Because I live overseas I've seen only one game of this series (game 1--ugh!), so I write from a fairly unbiased point-of-view given that I've seen very little of the series.  I am struck by the past two games in Houston--games lost by a total of 4 points.  Like George Baily learned--each moments affects all of the others.  Two extra free throws for Blazers or two fewer free throws by the Rockets in the first quarter has an effect on the last minute of the fourth quarter.  It's the Butterfly effect.  One more field goal or rebound at any point in the game can affect the outcome in ways that we cannot understand. 

This is a normal part of the game.  The problems comes because we (rightly) feel cheated if an opportunity is lost (or an advantage gained by the opponents) because of an official's mistake.  Now, i the normal course of events we expect mistakes by officials--we'd be inhuman and completely unfair not to expect such.  But we expect that such mistakes are purely the result human fallibility and should be, more or less, evenly distributed among both teams given a large enough sample.

We can debate whether four games is a large enough sample, but from the statistics presented on various sites with regard to free-throws attempted and such, there seems to a legitimate cause for concern.  The Rockets have had 30 more free throw attempts in a series where the last two games have been decided by 4 points.  That's significant.  Blazer centers have been burdened with foul trouble from the first quarter in most games--that affects decisions made by McMillan, Oden, and Pryz for the remainder of the game.

Going back to baseball one more time.  It's often easy to look at a baseball game, see a blown call, and conclude "If not for that call, we'd have won that game."  And for the most part, such a conclusion would be correct.  We can't do that in basketball because everything is way to interconnected and intertwined with everything else.  But the seeming imbalance in this Blazers-Rockets series does seem to warrant at least a look. 

And there is good news.  I checked the TV schedule and game 5 is going to be televised here in Indonesia!!!  Blazers!!!