Nice piece Bills. Seems the refs are equally good at tagging one another, (at least Earl Strom was). Thought I might drop a couple other Offical related items in your shopping basket for more confab..
Outside of Dallas owner Mark Cuban being fined $1M+ a couple years back, last season Houston's Jeff Van Gundy got tagged by Stern for $100,000.
Van Gundy claimed a NBA mole told him league Officials were biased against Yao Ming, that the refs were instructed to target Ming because of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's constant complaints, email and videotape deliveries to Sterns offices. The league took umberance with idea and accusation and seriously cut into Van Gundy's expensive wardrobe allowance.
Here's an interesting take from Cubans blog site;
"The accusations they make have been that I “send emails and video to the league”. Which of course is true. Every team does it.
We send emails to the league about officiating for three reasons.
1. To make sure we understand certain rules and how they will be called. How certain things are called can evolve over the course of a season. Knowing how something is being called can be helpful.
2. To understand if maybe an officiating crew just had a bad game, or if we had the wrong expectations on certain plays. In other words, did we think certain things were violations and they werent or were they missed calls. this also can tell you about the tendencies of a given official. This isnt however something you can do every game. This year we have sent in a list of calls to get confirmation three times. Probably a lot less than other teams.
3. This is probably the most important reason. When a player appears to be routinely violating a rule and no call is being made. For instance, two years ago, we sent a long list of tapes showing Chris Weber of the Kings at that point, dragging his pivot all over the place to create passing lanes. It was never called. The league came back and said we were right. They would look at it and they did. And they also looked at it for our players and ended it up calling it more on Antoine Walker that serie than they did on CWebb. And you know what, thats ok with me.
We did the same thing with Shaq stepping over the free throw line. Which in reality was the real genesis of doing this. It was so obvious to everyone and anyone that watched a game that he was doing it. No one could answer why it wasnt being called. So we made a tape and turned it in. They started calling it.
Shaq stared at me a lot when we played them, but he fixed it and it was done with. Thats the important thing to note. Any of these things can be fixed. The players know when they are doing things that break the rules. They would stop a pickup game if someone did it. They know how to fix them as well. When it gets called consistently, they change. I consider that a big win for the NBA.
Few things get under my skin more than emails from kids and parents asking why something so obvious isnt being called. I have no response other than “Im trying to get that changed”.
Im a purist. The rules is the rules. I dont care if you call it on us. I expect our players to adapt and play by the rules. I also expect them to take advantage of rules violations that arent being called.
When I decided to do this blog, after reading the comments from Sam Mitchell in Marc Steins article saying that he agreed with Phil Jacksons comments that officials were nervous nellies in Dallas, I had our guys go through and do a quick run through of our last game and what we thought were calls that we could discuss and were there any issues we should address."
You can read the rest at;
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000453073569/