The team centered around James Harden is complaining about unfair officiating. That cracks me up.
They just want the whole game to be a free throw shooting contest...
Well, if their opponents are fouling them, shouldn't the fouls be called because their opponents foul too much?
I don't know if I like this "Harden already gets lots of fouls, doesn't deserve more" theory.
And Harden draws lots of weird, unusual, fouls that don't seem right, but still, they're fouls.
Harden is the beneficiary, much like Giannis and Lebron, of a ton of calls that should be offensive fouls. Also, he uses the Reggie Miller leg flail/CP3 jump into the defender first then shoot moves to get what amounted to a league record 95 foul calls on three point shots. That's why its comical that Harden would be complaining
I disagree with all of that but focusing on Harden - how often have you actually seen him getting FTs on those Reggie Miller kickouts this season? We can keep a count - did he get any last game? THere was one of those plays near the end of the game but those aren't the missed calls that people are talking about. We can track it - let's see how many of those are called over this series - do you reckon so far it's been 0?
Refs haven't been calling those fouls for a while.
Most of those fouls on 3 point attempts Harden gets are of two types (let's exclude "legitimate" fouls where defenders just close out too recklessly, agressively, etc): hand fouls due to that rip-through and side-to-side shooting motions he does whenever a defender gets his hands on his space (Mark Cuban sent out a tweet yesterday saying the NBA should eliminate these fouls - not really sure it's that easy to phrase that in a rule though); and those fouls where he jumps forward and the defender gets in his landing space once his airborne - especially after his step back.
This latter type were the ones refs didn't call yesterday. Those were textbook fouls (reportedly, the refs apologized for missing them).
What makes these fouls so frequent with Harden, and also weird to see called, is that Harden jumps forward off step-backs - a very unnatural movement as players have always faded off step-backs. That's why he draws lots of those fouls - he makes a very strange movement very quickly and baits defenders into jumping forward to contest him when he's already initiated the motion to jump forward himself - and this results in a foul because defenders must give airborne shooters the space to land - they don't need to move out of their spots, but they can't get in the way of the shooters once the shooter is airborne.
What's problematic is that in most of those situations, Harden isn't really looking to make a basket. He goes through the shooting motion only to establish contact with the defender and get the foul. But they're still fouls.
People have gotten so confused about this that today I saw an ESPN analysis where the commentator applied the "verticality rule" to Harden (to the commentator's credit, he still managed to agree that Thompson had in fact commited those fouls). But the attacking player has no obligation to verticality; that only applies to defenders (otherwise, most dunks and layups wouldn't exist). Shooters can jump forward, sideways, backward, whatever - as long as the landing space is empty when they start their jump, they're entitled to it.
Anyway, this is the entire problem: Harden baits defenders into fouls in ways that are very novel, and that he executes better than anyone ever, which explains why he manages to do it so often. I find abhorrent, but I don't think refs can not calling them is the way to go.