I wasn’t watching this game live, so I’m not fully aware of the ramifications of Lance Stephenson’s elbow to the face of Boban Marjanovic in the overtime period. All I know is he went up for a layup while swinging his elbow into Boban’s head, the refs blew the whistle, there was a lot of standing around while they reviewed stuff, and then they gave Stephenson the basket plus a free throw.
To me, the foul was clearly on Lance and clearly not on Boban, unless violently hitting somebody’s in-motion elbow with your stationary face is grounds for a foul. But I’m not a ref, nor do I care that much about reffing, nor do I have a particular affinity for either of the Los Angeles teams, so I’ll let other people be outraged about it while I sit here and wonder why there aren’t more highlight-worthy performances happening tonight.
There are definitely some jokes about refs I could make, but I’d rather scrutinize the players themselves, who often pass unscrutinized by their fans, than the refs, who are scrutinized by everybody at all times. Here’s my scrutiny for Stephenson: his air guitar celebration would be cooler if he pretended to do a sick shredding guitar solo ala Yngwie Malmsteen rather than the dopey strumming he’s doing now. Any moron can strum chords on a guitar. It takes skill to sweep-pick arpeggios and twenty notes per second.