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I never said that going 5 for 25 from the line doesn't cost you a game. It clearly does. We lost this weekend and the refs completely blew the end of the game, allowing a poorly run table to fail to operate the clock correctly and failing to track the time themselves (a long story!). However, we lost because we put ourselves in that situation of being up 1 with 3 seconds to play by shooting absolutely atrociously, both from the field and from the line. When my players complained about the botched timing, I let them know why they really lost - because they put themselves in a position to lose.
The refs did not cost us the game, and that is not where I was going with the argument I was making. But you can extend my argument on the importance of a single basket to refereeing. A single late game major error by refs is far more meaningful than the same single error in the first quarter, in terms of game outcome. A team will not have the opportunity to recover from the mistake if it happens with 0:00 on the clock - it will if it happens in the first quarter.
You are taking an argument about two points and trying to make it mean something altogether different, involving multiple possessions, multiple errors or poor plays, and many more points than two. I have been in this game a long time, and two points early is not the same as two points late. Twenty points lost throughout a game are far more meaningful than two points lost late, but that is a different issue altogether than the one I was discussing. And we agree on that latter point.
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