The Houston Rockets didn’t completely pull a UCF and claim a championship, but they came awfully close.
Just hours after the Rockets lost Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals to the Warriors on Sunday — a game that had its share of controversy — ESPN reported that the Rockets filed a memo to the league that claimed NBA officials “likely changed” last season’s NBA champion.
According to the report, the Rockets audited Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals and determined that 81 instances took away 18.6 points from Houston.
Seriously. The Rockets had a team of analysts go through tape and issue a memo to the NBA just to whine.
Via ESPN:
“Referees likely changed the NBA champion,” says the memo, addressed to Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations. “There can no be no worse result for the NBA.”
It continued:
The Rockets also argue in their memo that veteran officials “exhibit the most bias against our players.”
“The reason we are in this situation,” the memo says, “is the efforts made to improve the referees have been too slow, not extensive enough, and have been held back by entrenched referees who are resisting reform.” The Rockets recommended that referee assignments in the postseason should be determined “exclusively” by call accuracy without regard to experience level.
While the NBA does evaluate the officials in L2M reports, it does not assign point values to missed or non-calls because, well, you can’t definitively know what would unfold if a random call with 10:40 left in the third quarter went a different way. The Rockets, though, did assign point values to these instances and predicted how it would affect the game. They said the Rockets would have won because of course they did.
Imagine going through this tedious exercise for no reason besides complaining — the Rockets couldn’t look worse. This was a game where the Rockets missed 27 straight attempts from 3-point range and finished 7 of 44 from deep. There is no upside in compiling a long — but questionable and subjective — report when the players shot historically poor.
Despite the Rockets’ determination that they should have been playing the Cavaliers in the 2018 NBA Finals, the NBA shut down the memo with a simple response.
“As we told the Rockets, we do not agree with their methodology,” Mike Bass, an NBA spokesman, told ESPN on Monday.
The Rockets can find more to complain about when they face Golden State for Game 2 on Tuesday.
