On that Arizona call…
The Lead ref didn’t call anything because he was stacked. Stacked means there are two primary matchups in your area and they are layering each other so you have no open looks.
Padilla, from as far away as he was, had the best open look. With that said:
- Was it a foul? *Technically* yes. Had the defender just went up and down, then nothing; however, he went what we call from point A to point B in his jump and jumped into the offensive players path causing him to veer off. Combined with the other calls in that game, it was a foul.
WITH THAT SAID—the rule of thumb is if you’re going to call a foul at that point and have that big of an impact on the game, it must be a foul that all 15,000 in the arena can see and know for a fact it was a foul. The foul Padilla called doesn’t fall into that category.
I had to make a call like this once. The top team in the conference was up by 1 point—at home—against the shittiest team in the conference who had won maybe a handful of games. Their player drives to the basket, missed the layup, gets their own rebound, and on the way up got hit on the head and it was very, very obvious. Everyone saw it. I blow the whistle and they are shooting 2 FTs. This would be a terrible upset. Well they go to the line and only make 1 of 2 and we headed to OT where the home team blew them out.
Sometimes it works that way, most times it does not.