Karalis: A great game was ruined, and that's a big problem for the NBA

The NBA has essentially tied a tourniquet around one of its legs, and they can't help but twist it from time to time.

The league already made it clear that money trumped all other concerns when they strong-armed the players into a breakneck restart of the season. They jammed games into a ridiculous schedule and relied on severely restricting player movement as a method of combatting COVID-19 outbreaks. Getting the games played, even if it meant starting G leaguers, or putting player health at risk, was the priority.

Now players like Evan Fournier are playing with symptoms he compared to a concussion. "I’ve been feeling really weird, to be honest," he admitted after the game. "At first the bright lights were bothering my eyes and my vision was blurry. Everything was just going too fast for me. It’s still the case. Some stuff is better, but at times I’m really struggling to focus and my eyes keep struggling focusing on one thing. My depth perception is really bad right now."

It has all added up to a less than ideal product, and the NBA is paying the price for it. TV ratings are down, and one of the many, varied reasons is that the product is simply not good enough, often enough. Big names have missed long stretches. Good teams have struggled. Players have been openly aggravated. All of this makes the fan experience worse.

Every once in a while, though, we get a good game this season. This one between the Boston Celtics and the Portland Trailblazers was one of them. Had it gone the way it should have, the game would have been celebrated as a gem. The losing team would have to acknowledge that it was a great fight, despite the result. This would have been a replay to watch on NBA TV.

Instead, the officials killed the end of the game by watching a replay on a courtside monitor for six minutes.

Marcus Smart and Jusuf Nurkic collided with 1:56 left and only three points separating the Blazers and Celtics. When Nurkic stayed down clutching a particularly sensitive area of his anatomy, the officials decided to review the play to see if Smart did anything untoward.

And so they put on their headsets and looked at the play. And they kept looking at it. Then they paused for a moment, and went back to it. 

Six full minutes of actual time elapsed before they decided it was an "unsportsmanlike act" and ejected him. And while I personally don't think that was intentional, that is besides the point.

What Sean Wright, Gediminas Petraitis, and Andy Nagy actually did when they gathered at that monitor for six minutes was smother the game of its fire and rob the fans of a chance to see two teams locked in a heavyweight fight determine who the better team was this night.

"I hate it," Jayson Tatum said of the extended review. "I think it throws the rhythm of the game off. I'm not necessarily a fan of reviews and challenging plays. But I guess it's just a part of the game now. But it throws off the rhythm of the game, especially in those late parts of the game."

Not only does it kill the flow of the game, the extended scrutiny of a play begins to erode all actual context from what happened on the floor. If seeing the play live, and spending a minute or so on the review doesn't convince three people that something happened, then maybe it didn't happen. The deeper into each frame of video someone goes, the more you remove the context of real time from the play.

All this begins to strip away what the actual purpose of officials is in the first place. They are tasked with making sure the game is played fairly, enforcing rules and punishing infractions so as to allow for the talent to shine on the floor. Their goal is to assure the basketball is as pure as possible, and that players are the ones deciding the outcome.

By dragging this particular review out to such a degree, they destroyed the sanctity of a beautiful game.

"I thought both teams got the rhythm broke a little bit by all that stuff," Brad Stevens said, adding "But I thought that that had nothing to do with the outcome."

He might be right. The problem is that we'll never know for sure.

Refs miss calls all the time. This isn't about that. It's about making sure fans get a good product, and each time the frenzy of a close game is interrupted by an extensive review, it saps the energy from something amazing.

Reviews are important. Getting the call right helps assure the outcome is fair. But until the NBA fixes this broken system, we're risking many more of these kinds of endings. That's not something the NBA wants, especially this season.

The worst outcome of this stupid season is a stupid ending like we saw in this game. Two teams spent about 43 minutes in heated battle and it was a treat for everybody. Then it all went away because three people couldn't decide in six minutes what happened in a two second clip.

Each time this happens, that tourniquet twists a little more. When the inevitable happens, the NBA can't spend time wondering how it's been cut off at the knees.

They're doing it to themselves. They only have themselves to blame.