The Golden State Warriors beat the Sacramento Kings on Tuesday night by a score of 110-105. That was a slim enough margin that the game qualified as a close contest under the league’s rules, which doesn’t reflect very well on the Warriors, considering that the Kings were shamelessly trying to lose the game.
Still, because it was a close game, it was added to the pool for the NBA’s Last 2 Minute Report. In the L2M, the league combs over every play in the final two minutes of close games, and examines
whether the calls that the officials made were correct or not. Just as crucially, it looks from multiple camera angles at the calls that weren’t made, and identifies which ones should have been.
In Sunday’s narrow loss to the Houston Rockets, the league determined that the Warriors were hurt by two non-calls that should have instead been whistles; the Warriors also benefitted from one such play.
But on Tuesday? No issues. After looking over the replay, the league determined that the officials handed the final two minutes of the game just as they should have. No calls were missed, and no calls were incorrectly made.
Of course, that doesn’t absolve the Kings, who purposely fouled Seth Curry with plenty of time left on the clock, raising the eyebrows of a league that is desperately trying to prevent tanking. But that’s a matter for a different day.
