The Suns still got owned in an elimination game, and if that doesn't prove that they shouldn't have been on the same court as the Spurs, I don't know what does.
to answer his last question, they should have won game 6, a la the pistons, and taken game 7 at home or just not dropped the first game of the series. all of this stuff about a tainted series is bull because this is not college. one game does not decide everything. everyone saw the heat win straight after dropping the first two final games; the suns should have done the same.
The Suns don't continue to lose playoff series because they drop games on our court. They lose because they can't hold serve on their own court. The Suns are 0-3 in series in 2003, 2005, and 2007 because they let us waltz in and lay a 7-2 record on their court.
Loser pussies.
Dance, Phoenix monkeys, dance!!
Dance, my monkeys!!!
It's the Sun's fans that are dancin' ...BIG LOSERS--------- again ...
Why does anything associated with Fox come off as terrible "look at me I'm controversial" crap?
Amare Stoudemire got in foul trouble in games besides game 3 too, and it wasn't because of a crooked ref, it's because the guy is a bad and sloppy defender.
Stoudemire committed the second most fouls per game (3.7) and overall fouls (295) in the NBA last year. He's basically a stupid defender who gets caught out of position on most plays. Phoenix will miss Thomas SO MUCH next year.
Sure whatever!!
The obsession continues....
Didn't D'Antoni get chastised for pulling Amare out and not letting him play early on in the game with those two fouls because "these are the playoffs?"
You are on a Spurs board talking about obsession .....
thats funny
You are on a Spurs board talking about obsession .....
Just when Phoenix Suns fans were moving through the acceptance phase of their grief over last year's unjust playoff exit comes another knee to the groin.
Win or go home. Seems pretty clean cut and fair to me.
What part of Arizona does the article author hail from?
Wishful thinking.
What part of Arizona does the article author hail from?
It's interesting to me how some Suns fans can throw rhetorical grenades around, whining about their team's loss to the Spurs and insinuating that things somehow weren't on the up-and-up, only to castigate any Spurs fan who responds as being the party who is unwilling to let that series go.
The obvious solution for Spurs fans is to ignore the posts and let those Suns fans who wish to pout and whine do just that. The silence -- the lack of any responses to their belligerence -- might actually cause them to leave.
Again, wishful thinking.
Its already done, nobody will remember this 50-something years from now. We got the trophy and they didn't, the media just wants to hope to put an asterisk to our ring.
Simmons - ESPN Page 2
So that's two significant problems. Problem No. 1 will fade away over time, although it will never completely disappear. Problem No. 2 can be fixed, although it will take some major work. But Problem No. 3 can't be fixed. If the allegations are true, Tim Donaghy didn't just violate the integrity of the league and rig some games. There's a good chance he altered the course of the 2007 championship. Only three teams had a chance last year: Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. When Dallas choked against Golden State in the opening round, the NBA's refusal to fix a broken playoff system came back to haunt it in Round 2, thanks to a Spurs-Suns matchup that suddenly doubled as the NBA Finals. In Game 1, San Antonio stole home-court advantage with a convincing win that everyone remembers because Steve Nash busted his nose open. The Suns rallied back with a blowout win in Game 2. Here's what I wrote after the third game -- the Spurs were favored by four, with an over/under of 200.5 -- after San Antonio prevailed, 108-101, thanks to Amare Stoudemire playing just 21 minutes because of foul trouble:
Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.
Now ...
THE ZAPRUDER FILM
Follow-up note: A few hours after this column was posted on Sunday morning, an NBA fan posted "highlights" from Game 3 on YouTube that reveal Donaghy making a number of questionable calls during that Spurs-Suns game, including the three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili that I mentioned in my column (and two months ago as well).
After the call is made, play-by-play announcer Mike Breen calls it a "late whistle" three different times, then a replay of the play shows that there was no contact, followed by Breen saying "doesn't look like there was much there" and partner Jon Barry adding, "I don't know what he saw!"
Collectively, it's a damning collection of anti-Phoenix calls, although not all of them were made by Donaghy. Expect the highlights of this game to eventually become the Zapruder Film of the Donaghy Scandal. Sorry, Phoenix fans.
Before the Donaghy scandal broke, if you told me there was a compromised official working a 2007 playoff game and made me guess the game, I would have selected Game 3 of the Spurs-Suns series. There were some jaw-dropping calls throughout, specifically, the aforementioned Ginobili call and Bowen hacking Nash on a no-call drive that ABC replayed from its basket camera (leading to a technical from D'Antoni). Both times, Mike Breen felt obligated to break the unwritten code that play-by-play announcers -- don't challenge calls and openly questioned what had happened. The whole game was strange. Something seemed off about it.
At the time, I assumed the league had given us another "coincidence" where three subpar refs (and calling that crew "subpar" is being kind) were assigned to a Game 3 in which, for the interest of a long series, everyone was better off having the home team prevail ... just like I anticipated another "coincidence" in which one of the best referees would work Game 4 to give Phoenix a fair shake in a game that, statistically, they were more likely to win. After all, it's easier to win Game 4 on the road than Game 3, when the fans are pumped up and the home team is happy to be home.(Which is exactly how it played out. Steve Javie worked Game 4, a guy who Jeff Van Gundy deemed "the best ref in the league" during the Finals. Hmmmm.) Look, this could have been an elaborate series of connected flukes. I'm just telling you that none of it surprised me. Which is part of the problem.
But here's what I didn't expect: That a potentially crooked ref was working that game.
Imagine being a Suns fan right now. You just spent the past two months believing that your team got screwed by the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions, that you would have won Game 1 if Nash didn't get hurt, that you would have taken Game 3 if you hadn't been screwed by the officials, that you would have cruised in Game 5 if two of your best guys weren't suspended for running towards their best player as he lay in a crumpled heap. Now it looks like an allegedly compromised referee worked Game 3.
Well, how much did Donaghy affect the game? How many calls did he whistle on Stoudemire? How many of Bowen's potential fouls did he not call? Was he the seemingly incompetent schmuck who made that three-seconds-too-late call on Ginobili? Did Tim Donaghy cost you that game?
If David Stern wants to do right by the fans, then he should order NBA TV to rerun the tape of Game 3. We need answers. We need to know for sure. , they can start a series called "NBA Hardwood Classics: The Tim Donaghy Collection" and we'll spend the rest of the summer combing through games and figuring out how many Donaghy could have fixed. Like Game 6 of the Raptors-Nets series, which New Jersey won by a point in the final seconds. Did he swing that one? What about Game 2 of the Orlando-Detroit series, when the Magic rallied for a late cover in the final seconds with Donaghy jogging around? What about the Heat-Knicks game from last February in which the Knicks were given a 39-8 free-throw advantage and covered a 4.5-point spread by 1.5 points? Did Donaghy call those two technical fouls on the Miami coaches? Is there footage of Pat Riley screaming at him?
The Video
Enjoy those 50 years.
You're right LJ. Being on All Ignore is underrated.
And I can't believe the NBA enforced a rule that's been on the books for a while now, a rule that's also been strictly enforced. They *TOTALLY* wanted the flashy, run-and-gun, No-D, all-offense, big-market Spurs to win another le!
Maybe they really wanted the good guy image of TD. Maybe Stern thought the image of the unassuming TD would play better in Peoria than the Black Jesus tattoos and perceived arrogance and ignorance of Amare.
Christ.
Why are there so many ing haters that can't accept that the Spurs win every other year. They have arguably the best PF of all time. A frenchman who can score in the paint at will, an Argentinean who is fearless, League veterans who step up in the clutch, and role players who know their role and do work son.
But no, everyone wants the Suns to win because they have a little white Canadian baller and Black jesus on their team.
I'm getting ing sick of everyone and their god damn mother trying to find any flaw they can about the Spurs gold.
I can't wait to see us repeat and then hear what people will say next.
all the hubbub about the ref fixing the game got me to re-watch it. the ref crap is bs. among the highlights:
-- amare missed a dunk late in the 4th
-- any question about his early foul trouble can't be blamed on the accused ref because he didn't make those calls. what's more, the first was amare knocking down finley and the other was amare sliding underneath horry. on top of that, the only questionable foul of his 5 that night was when oberto stopped in front of amare and amare knocked him down away from the action, thus an offensive foul.
-- raja bell hit 4-4 in the first half but didn't get the ball or take a shot in the second half
-- no one complained about bowen holding nash until the fourth quarter, mostly because parker and ginobili guarded nash for much of the night up until then. on top of that, after the infamous d'antoni crap fit of "why call it now?!" nonsense (overlooking the fact that there was no problem up until the fourth quarter, and thus nothing to call until then), the refs started calling it.
-- bowen's knee to the groin, often sited as evidence of the spurs getting away with stuff, was actually called as an offensive foul. plus, he did the exact same move the next time the spurs had the ball, except nash wasn't crowding him this time
-- no foul called when marion raked gino's eye
-- the spurs had a double-digit lead for a good part of the fourth, and were up 9 at the 2:35 mark.
AT LEAST 1 ref from that crew was on the take. If you don't think that calls the entire series--the entire playoffs--into question, you're fooling yourself.
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