Bill Simmons of gardening, interior design, gossip, celebrity news, acupuncture, art, television, entertainment and sports website Grantland.com -- also known as "The Sports Guy" -- discussed the NBA on a recent "BS Report" podcast with Joe House.
The discussion included a reference to Dave's recent look at end-of-season officiating numbers for the Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz.
Audio of the podcast is here. A transcript of the exchange is below.
Bill Simmons: On the play that Kobe blew out his Achilles, they called a foul.
Joe House: He fell down.
Bill Simmons: He fell down. It wasn't even one of the top-five worst calls of the game.
Joe House: It was a near nudging. An assault, not a battery, a near nudging. An assault.
Bill Simmons: Kobe's blown Achilles, all that did was divert everyone's attention away from what was one of the worst officiated games of the past 20 years. An absolute travesty in every respect. And everybody was like, 'The Lakers were playing more inside.' The shot charts were dead even. The Warriors had like 15 offensive rebounds and 16 foul shots, that's like impossible. The Lakers have played more games this year where there's a call that's such a bad call, that everybody on the court turns to the bench with their palms outstretched, just in disbelief, like, 'Whoa, did you see that? It's not just me, right?'
Joe House: Now they've got two of the all-time greats in terms of responding to bad calls in [Greg Popovich and Tim Duncan in the playoffs].
Bill Simmons: Did you see who reffed the Sunday game, Spurs/Lakers? Take a guess: Who is the worst possible ref for the Spurs to see in that game? Oh yeah, [Joey Crawford], he was reffing that game. You've got to be kidding me. People think I'm crazy with this stuff. Freaking look at the evidence. There's a great post somebody did at the Blazersedge blog about how the disparity of foul shots for the Lakers over the last 15 games.
-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter