Timekeeping Errors

[Stat-Man]

(This also came up in our Thursday night social, but deserves a separate thread.)

Team A has the ball with 20-some seconds left in the period. For whatever reason the timekeeper starts the clock 3 seconds late, but nobody says anything.

Team A goes into their stall offense to wait for the clock to run down before attacking. With 3 seconds left on the clock, the official blows the play dead and says he's been counting the time (for all this time ?) and that the period is over.

While this is a HTBT thing in my mind, my question is if you know the clock was improperly started and a team isn't aggressively attacking their basket, would you whistle play dead and correct the time, just to avoid this sort of situation? I could see if there was 5 seconds left and there was no time to reasonably correct the clock, but with 20+ seconds and a team trying for the last shot, it seems like this could have been caught sooner.