The Triple Team: A missed call late caused Damian Lillard and others to tweet angrily

Three thoughts on the Utah Jazz’s 117-114 win over the Portland Trail Blazers from Salt Lake Tribune Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen.

1. That call, those refs

Jazz fans will probably be annoyed that I’m starting with the non-call of Rudy Gobert’s block that cost Lillard a game-tying layup. There were many other things to write about in that game.

But: when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski tweets about a game, not a trade or a free agency signing, you know it’s a big deal. When a call leads to multiple angry tweets from one of the league’s best players in Damian Lillard, you know it’s a big deal. When C.J. McCollum is calling for refs to be fined, you know it’s a big deal. And when Lillard then gets in a back and forth with Donovan Mitchell, well, you get it.

Here’s the play:

Yep, it’s goaltending. It’s also arguably a foul on Royce O’Neale, coming over and jumping into Lillard, though on second look, O’Neale does a good job of getting to the spot and jumping pretty vertically. Obviously, if they call the whistle and the foul, it’s an and-one that could have won the game for Portland.

It is, very honestly, unbelievable that three referees to have missed that call. On many missed calls, it’s a mistake by one man: the other referees are watching off-ball action, or they’re screened off the play, or whatever. On this play, three referees should be looking at what happens, and whether or not it was a goaltend. For all of them to miss it? I mean, as multiple Blazers said, that’s inexcusable.

What also wasn’t good was what the officials told the Blazers after the call. Now, this is from their perspective, but McCollum said the referees said two things: “it wasn’t even close” and “it might have been obvious to you but it wasn’t obvious to us... it wasn’t as obvious as you thought it was.” McCollum was much more accurate than the refs were.

After the game, crew chief Josh Tiven said “We’ve since looked at it via postgame video review, and unfortunately saw that we missed the play, and a goaltending violation should have been called.” They messed up what they told the players, but that’s about as good of a statement as they could have given after the game.

But, honestly they lost the plot all night long. At halftime, I rated the officiating a 2 or 3 out of 10, and it got worse. Jazz fans are up in arms about the missed whistles going the other way: Mitchell thought he was fouled in the final minute going for a layup, Rudy Gobert had his jersey grabbed a foot away from his body, etc. Maybe even more egregious than the final missed whistle was that the clock didn’t work for a full possession... and nobody noticed.

So if the refs weren’t watching the clock, weren’t watching the players, weren’t watching the ball... what exactly were they doing out there?

I don’t know what should happen to refs who make inexcusable mistakes in the course of their job. McCollum suggested they should be fined and reprimanded. They’ll definitely be reprimanded by the league office, and though I wish that were public, it’s not.

These mistakes will reflect very badly on them, and cost them in the NBA’s ref rankings that determines who gets to call playoff series as well. So they’ll be losing the opportunity for further money. Should they be fined by the league? I don’t know. Do players get fined for missing shots? They don’t. Do I get fined for writing bad articles? I don’t. On the other hand, if I did, maybe I would write better articles.

It all just sucks. Tonight, Lillard RTed this:

Having a star player like Lillard basically blame the league’s rating decline on the referees, and support that? Well, it’s not likely to help that problem. If the players don’t have confidence in the officiating, why would fans? And if the outcome isn’t one-to-one correlated to the play on the court, why watch?

2. Jazz throw everything at Lillard late

Here’s one reason: before those last 10 seconds, that was a really fun game. Heck, if you include the 10 seconds that didn’t get ticked off, that was a full 48 minutes of fun basketball!

The key was that after allowing the Blazers to score 72 points in the first half, they only allowed 42 in the second. That probably overstates the turnaround from a Jazz defensive perspective: a whole lot of that turnaround was that the Blazers were absolutely gobsmackingly on fire in the first half and missed a lot of open shots in the second half.

But the Jazz undoubtedly turned up their defensive ability in the second half as well. Here’s what it looked like in the first half: you can see Gobert pointing at Mitchell to contain Lillard, which he’s way too late to do. Then, Gobert has to handle him, but he can’t do anything with Lillard at the rim.

In the second half, they were much more successful at dedicating resources to stop Lillard. Like, here, the Jazz send Royce O’Neale completely off Mario Hezonja in the corner to stop Lillard’s drive in the paint, and the result is a tougher pullup.

The math works out: believe it or not, Hezonja is shooting only 24% on wide open threes this year, per NBA.com. He’s probably a slightly better shooter than that, but not much.

Here, they trap Lillard super hard in the corner, so he passes it to Carmelo Anthony, who has a wide open midrange shot. Anthony is one of the best midrange shooters ever, and yet... a miss.

This is fortunate, to be sure, but it also shows just how good Lillard is: the Jazz would rather have this wide open Melo shot than anything Lillard is capable of. But the Jazz didn’t let Lillard beat them late, and the other players weren’t able to take advantage.

3. A rotation change

Quin Snyder changed up his rotation for tonight’s game in an interesting way. Here’s the rotation chart from NBA.com — a new feature of theirs!

When a player has a horizontal bar shaded in during a time period, that means he was in the game during that time. The darker the shade, the more points that player scored during that timeframe.

The change the Jazz made was this: instead of putting Donovan Mitchell with the second unit, Mike Conley got those minutes, leading a bench unit that featured Jordan Clarkson, Georges Niang, and Tony Bradley — either Royce O’Neale or Joe Ingles split the fifth spot.

And in the second half, another change was made: Juwan Morgan played small-ball center for a couple of minutes. He picked up two fouls, but also got a putback. Niang and Bradley were re-inserted in the fourth, so this one may have been a quick matchup-based experiment by Snyder.

Still, the minutes worked. The minutes in which Conley, Clarkson, Niang, and Bradley played were a +9, turning the tide in the Jazz’s favor when they played. And so that’s reason to believe that we’ll continue to see Conley, not Mitchell, play with the bench.

I think that makes sense. Mitchell has proven to struggle during those minutes, and giving Conley a chance allows him to get in the flow of the game as a primary creator, not just a supporting player. The latter is something he’s struggled with as he’s integrated with the Jazz, but this lets him run a unit. Tonight, it was an effective look.