This took place at an 8th grade game. Unbelievable. Tie game with two seconds left. Home team gets a defensive rebound under the basket and calls time out. NFHS rules, and the ref proceeds to take the ball to half court instead of under the basket. A visiting fan, who had been chipping away all night, tells the ref how incompetent he is for going to half-court. Ref tells him, "That's it, I've had enough from you!" and rings up the visiting team for the T! Two shots, good, inbound, game over. Wow.

Ouch. 2 kicked calls.
1) Ref watching too many NBA games.
2) Ref not realizing :02 more seconds and then just get out.

Composure comes with experience.

An 8th grade game and the fan had been chipping all night? 8th grade games often get inexperienced refs. They were probably doing the best they knew how. It's too bad for the coaches and players that it had to end that way, but it serves the fan right. Unfortunately, any idiot fan chipping at an 8th grade game will never learn from that experience so the lesson is lost.

Z

True, ZM, but where was this guy's partner? You've got to step in and say, "we are NOT going to do that." About the only situation you call Ts on the crowd is a situation like the infamous Florida game years ago when they threw tennis balls on the court after that Florida idiot was accused of spitting on a kid at a tennis court (very short version of story). Dwayne something or other.

99.9% of all the abuse we take is unjustified, but its these sorts of incidents that keep getting spouted to "prove" we screw everything up.

As for the experience of the officials, this is in a Lutheran school league in Green Bay area. Basketball is very big--too big--to many of these people. These are grade schools that have rivalries going back sometimes more than fifty years. We'll get 300 people at these games sometimes. Our league rules require us to have WIAA registered officials. Most of us are guys that do (or have retired from) high school ball as well. Of course, none of that means there are any guarantees. (I wasn't working this game, but I've worked that school quite a few times and heard about it from both AD's after the fact).

1) What does the NBA have to do with this thread? :confused: When is the last time you saw a T on a fan in the NBA? I'm genuinely confused as to what you're getting at here.

2) If a call should be made, what does the 2 seconds have to do with it? I agree that the T was not correct here. But if there was some call -- block/charge, shooting foul, whatever -- that needed to be made, wouldn't you do it regardless of the time on the clock? This is a tie game, not a 40 point blowout that you just want to run away from.

Relax Chuck.

"Home team gets a defensive rebound under the basket and calls time out. NFHS rules, and the ref proceeds to take the ball to half court instead of under the basket."

Ok, he wasn't talking about the T. But what does taking the ball out at midcourt have to do with the NBA? They move it up to the 28' line in the frontcourt. :)

Good point. This entire discussion seems as useless as web pages for the blind.

:shrug:

Very well stated, Dan!!! Bravo!!!

What happened to the days of getting a game administrator and getting the idiot fan out of the building. I would agree with getting the :02 over with and getting the hell out of there, if the game had no chance of getting to OT, but most likely, the game in question is going OT and you have to put up with the idiot for 4 more minutes. Take care of business.

Well, I've always heard that you leave the fans to the administrator, let them deal with it. I talked to the AD today, and he said that the obnoxious fan also happened to be the boys' B-team coach, whose game had just ended before this game, so the ref had probably been fed up with him from that.

Game Adminisrtator at an 8th grade game? What's that?

I can't ever remember those days. You don't always get an administrator at a game and even more rarely do they do anything with regard to fans.