LeBron James was right, even if he was joking. The Cleveland Cavaliers superstar blocked Victor Oladipo at the rim as the Cavs trailed in the final seconds, then pulled up for the game-winning three at the buzzer to give Cleveland a 3-2 series lead over the Indiana Pacers. After the game, James joked that his block was actually goaltending, meaning the ball had already touched the backboard before he got a hand on it. Oladipo was in a far worse mood when he admitted that he thought the exact same thing.
It was bang-bang play for sure, but when the NBA released its Final Two Minutes report on Thursday afternoon the truth was clear: the play should have been called goaltending.
The NBA's last-two-minutes report is out, and it says, indeed, that last night the Cavs should have retained the ball with 27.6 seconds to go (refs mistook who last touched it before it went out). And, indeed, LeBron's block on Oladipo with 5 seconds to go was actually a goaltend pic.twitter.com/cAoGFqNIAJ
— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) April 26, 2018
To be fair, the report also said the Cavaliers should have had another possession in the closing moments as well, but the block on Oladipo directly impacted the score of the game while the missed out of bounds call flipped possession. It’s a gigantic “chicken or the egg” argument, but with the waning seconds of a basketball game.
The report is more of a check on the officials and the calls they make down the stretch than anything, so we can’t undo history here. The game might have played out differently with another two points on the board for the Pacers heading into Cleveland’s final possession, but that’s impossible to really know.
