The Thuggets, or the Nuggets, if you insist, need to be defeated as soon as possible. If they win the West, there will be a lot of flagrant fouls and fights in basketball in coming years, as teams copy the Thuggets' style of fouling on most inside drives by the other team. And then eventually flagrants and fights will become much more common as players get sick and tired of being fouled over and over and over again.
The Nuggets, and I thanks to them, have discovered that a team can win games by "overloading the referees." In other words, they have discovered that the referees can only call so many fouls in a game, or the game gets to be ridiculous and very ugly. The NBA loses a good product for the public if a massive number of fouls are called. Who wants to watch players shoot free throws all night?
Plus the referees, if they call fouls beyond the unwritten limit, are going to be questioned by their bosses at NBA headquarters. If they call fouls beyond the unwritten limit, they might not be promoted when a promotion is due.
So knowing there is an unwritten but real limit on the number of fouls that can be called, the Nuggets go past the limit, and so some of their fouls can not be called.
The real world unwritten limit on the number of fouls that can be called in a game is anywhere from 25 to at the very most 40 fouls on any one team, and between 50 to 70 fouls in a game in total. The exact limit in a particular game will depend on the referee crew, the game, where it is played, and who knows what other variables.
My theory earlier this year was that since the referees in the playoffs are experienced and highly ranked, that they would look at Denver as a team trying to substitute roughness for skill (which is what they are doing by the way). And that they would as a result not be afraid to "contain" the Nuggets, and to call fouls in a quantity close to the limit if needed.
This is what happened in at least fifteen regular season games.
But this was proved wrong in both games 1 and 2 of the Nuggets-Mavericks playoff series, when the referees were not all that interested in calling fouls in general, let alone in getting up toward the limit. I'll grant you that the Nuggets were using more skill and less fouling than I expected. And that's probably the reason right there why the referees were very easy on them.
But the Nuggets were still using a great deal of fouling, and they were definitely the beneficiaries of a lot of uncalled fouls in both of the first two games, most especially in game one. Meanwhile, Dallas, ironically, was called for numerous touch fouls.
Dallas obviously is following traditional basketball, not the Rough Basketball that Denver is seeing how far they can get with.
In game 3, the referees finally did what I predicted they would do in the playoffs. They buried the Nuggets with fouls: 34 of them, and sure enough, the Nuggets lost.
But actually the Nuggets officially won, because the referees botched an intentional foul call with a few seconds left. There is no limit to the amount of luck the Nuggets have received this season; it must be some kind of a record, but "luck" records are not kept so we can not know for sure.
Many cliches are myths, but the cliche that fewer fouls are called in the playoffs than in the regular season, which I thought was a myth,laugh at me if you have to, may be a reality after all.
I am going to research this and get to the bottom of this crucial subject in the near future. Of course I will report the results here.
So by overloading the referees, at least in games where their defending skill level is low, the Nuggets are disrespecting the traditions of basketball. The 1989 Pistons and all other supposedly rough defenses did not take things to the extreme that Denver has. Moreover, the 1989 Pistons and other famous Championship winners and Championship losing teams had better defenses, and therefore more skilled defenses, than Denver does this year.
Much, much more about this later; look for unbelievably interesting stuff about the 30 NBA Championship winners and the 30 NBA Championship losers since the introduction of the 3-point shot for the 1979-80 season.
Here is where all of this leads. Don't make basketball like football or hockey, please. I think there should be another popular sport besides baseball that features a lot of skill and almost no violence.
We need two sports where it's all skill and strategy and no outright violence. Fouling on the vast majority of in the paint shot attempts spoils basketball.
Go ahead, call me a wuss for wanting basketball to remain a skill sport rather than a sport decided by who is more violent or rough on the court. Go ahead and do that, make my day. That's what I want to be, a wuss, if that is what you are for wanting to maintain basketball as a skill and strategy sport rather than a violent sport.
The bottom line is that basketball will be changed for the worse, at least temporarily, if the Nuggets defeat the Lakers or the Rockets in the West final this year. Because there will be copycats if that happens: monkey see, monkey do's.
So I am very much hoping and expecting that the Nuggets will lose, and that the traditions of basketball will be upheld and will continue on, so that everyone can enjoy a truly great sport of skill and strategy.
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