Thursday night’s showdown between the Houston Rockets and defending champion Golden State Warriors took overtime to decide, with James Harden coming up huge in the clutch with a game-winning three-pointer with just a second remaining to give his team its sixth straight victory.
It was a game that very easily could’ve gone the other way. On the previous sequence, the referees missed an egregious out-of-bounds call on Kevin Durant that resulted in a Steph Curry three-pointer and a two-point lead for the Warriors with time winding down.
Chris Paul and Rockets GM Daryl Morey both reacted to the no call using the #BirdBoxChallenge meme, while many others around the league took to social media to express their disbelief at such a blatant missed call. As it turns out, Kevin Durant was fully aware of how far out of bounds he was on the play in question, as he told the media after the game. However, he chalked it up to bad officiating all around.
Kevin Durant knew he was way out of bounds on that late save, wasn’t surprised the call was missed: “The refs were missing a lot tonight.” pic.twitter.com/Ey0uJ7d42O
— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 4, 2019
“I could believe it because the refs were missing a lot of that tonight,” Durant said. “They were missing a lot, in general, so you could easily fool them.”
When asked whether he’d seen that video, which went viral almost immediately, he smiled sheepishly and said yes. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole playing the “what if” game with calls like this, but in this case, the Rockets were able to prevail anyway. Still, it should be a relatively easy decision when the Last Two Minute Report eventually comes out.
