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In the aftermath of the Los Angeles Lakers‘ overtime loss to the Boston Celtics this past weekend — ABC’s most-watched Saturday prime-time regular season NBA game since 2019 — much of the discussion turned to a blown foul call on LeBron James‘ layup in the last seconds of regulation and his dramatic reaction to it.
James dropped to his knees in protest, and Lakers teammate Patrick Beverley earned a technical foul for showing a photographer’s camera to an official as evidence Celtics star Jayson Tatum made contact with James. The tech handed Boston a one-point edge to start overtime, and the Celtics emerged with a 125-121 win.
Lead official Eric Lewis conceded to a pool reporter after the game, “The crew missed the play,” and on Sunday the official Twitter account of the National Basketball Referees Association tweeted, “Like everyone else, referees make mistakes. We made one at the end of last night’s game and that is gut-wrenching for us. This play will weigh heavily and cause sleepless nights as we strive to be the best referees we can be.”
A rare concession, considering incorrect calls are outlined daily on the league’s last two-minute reports, which assess “officiated events that occurred in the last two minutes of games that were at or within three points during any point in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter (and overtime, where applicable).”
In the last two-minute report of Saturday’s game, the league identified two missed calls at the end of regulation — Tatum’s foul and an offensive foul by Anthony Davis that would have negated Beverley’s go-ahead basket 18 seconds earlier, giving the final possession to the Celtics (and nullifying James’ layup).
In the aggregate, both teams benefited from missed calls, but the focus stayed on the final play, since we all get caught in the climactic moment, and the Lakers’ feigned protest drew even greater attention to it.
“The best player on Earth can’t get a call,” Lakers coach Darvin Ham told reporters. “It’s amazing.”
“It’s been building,” James added of his frustration level following several recent last-second non-whistles. “You guys have seen some of the games we’ve lost this year with late-game missed calls. We had an opportunity to literally win the game. … I don’t understand what we’re doing. I watch basketball every single day. I watch these games every single day, and I don’t see it happening to nobody else. It’s just weird.”
It seemed weird to me that the league’s highest-profile franchise and highest-profile player would flirt so closely with the idea that somehow the officials (and the NBA by extension) are conspiring against them.
So, I decided to review every last two-minute report for the Lakers this season, just to see if an assessment of every late call in their 19 close games supported or denied their claims. The NBA deemed its officials had missed a total of 34 calls or no-calls in those games, and 21 of them (or 61.8%) had favored the Lakers.
Requests came in for most other teams, so I conducted the research, and here is a table of the number of close games for each team, the total amount of incorrect calls or no-calls in those games, the number of those calls that went in favor of each team, and the percentage of favorable calls that each team received:
Only five of the league’s 30 teams have had either more than 60% or fewer than 40% of missed calls go in their favor, according to the NBA’s own internal assessment. The research will do little to dispel the notion that larger markets get more favorable calls than smaller ones, since the handful of outliers include the Clippers, Lakers and Warriors on the highest end of favorability, and the Jazz and Kings on the lowest end.
One of the few conclusions we can draw from this data is that the Lakers are not being singled out.
Take their recent double-overtime loss to Dallas. The league ruled that Mavericks big man Christian Wood should have been whistled for a foul on another last-second play that would have also put James on the free-throw line with a chance to win the game in regulation. James made sure to mention that after the Boston loss as well. What he did not mention were the three previous incorrect calls that went in the Lakers’ favor.
The NBA’s determination that 76ers center Joel Embiid‘s contact with Lakers guard Russell Westbrook prior to a failed winning shot attempt earlier this month was “marginal” and called correctly will lead some to question the validity of last two-minute reports altogether. That is fine, but if your position is that the league is actively trying to prevent its highest-profile team and highest-profile player from boosting its playoff television ratings, the last two-minute reports — and common sense — tell a different story.
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Ben Rohrbach is a senior NBA writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach