The end of Saturday’s game between the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers was marred by a bizarre series of replays, officiating decisions, and technical difficulties that left both teams feeling sour. The ending was so bad that it had Warriors coach Steve Kerr calling for a big change to how replay is handled.
LeBron James had a key three-pointer retroactively taken off the board late in the fourth quarter when Witnesses to a different out-of-bounds call noted that James’ heel made contact with the sideline before to the shot. They missed an additional out-of-bounds call on a subsequent jump ball, which prompted a Lakers challenge and yet another lengthy review. They then retroactively banned the three.
The shot clock finally broke after the second review, to top it all off. While all of this was cleared up, the game was effectively delayed from start to finish by eighteen minutes.
Following the incident, Kerr proposed that the NBA restrict replay review to possible buzzer-beaters, claiming that the disturbance to the game’s flow outweighed the advantages of more reviews.
“I think we should have replay just for the buzzer-beaters, and that’s it.”
Kerr is not a fan of replay review 😳 pic.twitter.com/eRWAFdn3Qc
— Warriors on NBCS (@NBCSWarriors) March 17, 2024
“I’m not a fan of replay. I think we should have replay just for buzzer-beaters and that’s it,” Kerr told reporters. “The whole goal with replay is to try to get everything right, but there’s 100 plays at each end every night that are subjective. It’s not tennis. It’s not Hawk-Eye where the ball is either in or out. There’s all kinds of subjective events that took place. We will never be able to do everything perfectly. The game’s pace, in my opinion, is far more crucial.
Many people in the league would probably agree with Kerr at this point. Although the NBA has tried to address this particular issue, as Saturday showed, replay usage in this manner will never be widely accepted. A portion of the issue stems from how long some reviews can take absurdly long; in the final two minutes, when it seems like everything is being looked at, close games frequently come to an abrupt stop. Even if the game on Saturday was on the extreme end of the spectrum, it happens far too frequently.
