[PackersFTW]

we've all seen bad calls, thousands of times, but have you ever seen a ref make a call that wasn't even legal? during the game, ron artest drove to the basket, and andres nocioni wrapped him up, and the foul was kinda hard, but not really. well, the ref saw the foul as too hard, so gave nocioni a technical on top of the regular foul. so i was like hmm i thought it's either a regular or a flagrant. turns out i was right. check this out, straight from nba.com:

"Section V--Conduct
a. An official may assess a technical foul, without prior warning, at any time. A technical foul(s) may be assessed to any player on the court or anyone seated on the bench for conduct which, in the opinion of an official, is detrimental to the game. A technical foul cannot be assessed for physical contact when the ball is alive. "

and i know what everybody is thinking, and i don't blame you. you think that i'm mistaken, and the technical must have been for arguing after the call, on somebody else, etc, but that wasn't the case. the announcers were slightly confused, and the coach asked the ref what's up, but i believe they were talking more of why was he called for a hard foul, instead of noticing you can't even call a technical for a hard foul. i'm just curious how a 24 year old who has no nba experience noticed this, yet the coaching staff, officials, and announcers didn't.