A slightly interesting one

[JugglingReferee]

Originally posted by JugglingReferee
Here's the stich.

This actually happened in a provincial high school finals game.

Team W and Team L. (Named after the city they're from.) There is one official from the city of W and one from the city of L, to give a "neutral crew". Officials tell each team that they have no timeouts remaining. Twice. They also tell the players. The coaches each told their respective players that there are no timeouts left.

Tie game, 5 seconds to go. L1 on the line to shoot a 1-and-1. First shot misses. W1 rebounds. The LEAD official on the FT (now the TRAIL on the defensive missed-FT rebound) is from the city of W and twice ignores W2's request for a TO. W2 runs over to the ref from the city of L and requests a TO. The timeout is granted (in that the official blew his whistle - I do not know if he 'pointed' to the Team W bench). At the time of the whistle, there was 1.0 seconds on the clock. The clock runs out and the buzzer sounds.

What happens next?

I will post what the officials did later on, after a bunch of replies.

Here's what the TRAIL official called:

He whistled and granted a TO.

After the timeout, he then assessed a technical foul and awarded L3 two shots. First one went in. Game over.

Congrats to refnrev for calling the bank! (Except that he reversed the city references.)

Points that were brought up:
1. How can you grant a timeout with no time on the clock. Once the buzzer went, the quarter ended. Game tied means that OT starts right after 4Q ends. A TO to start the OT is granted.

My reply was that in sitch's like this, the lag time rule is a rule that is invoked after all other rules have been completed. It's sole purpose it to determine how much time remains on the clock, not when an event occurred. So, the rule governing the granting and penalizing an excessive timeout is not ignored. It just so happens that the team's request was granted with less than 1.1 seconds to go.

The person disagreeing with me does so on game management grounds. To me, this is a situation where game management can't do anything to save the day. The only arguement I can see is the official from the city of W says something like he went to blow his whistle, but no air came out. He could claim that he saw (picking an arbitrary amount of time) 3.7 seconds on the clock.

W2 pulled a Webber. A million chinese won't care tomorrow.