More basketball

It was an interesting day for NBA basketball, or at least interesting to those who follow the sport. The Dallas Mavericks played the San Antonio Spurs. At this point in the season the game meant nothing, but because of the rivalry both teams still played their stars the entire game for pride's sake.

But late in the third quarter, Spurs star Tim Duncan was ejected from the game for seemingly doing nothing wrong. All the video replays showed was Duncan laughing on the bench. He never even made eye contact with the referee, Joey Crawford, who threw him out. Crawford seemed to just react to what he felt were taunts from Duncan.

There is a journalistic/editing point to this and it has to do with yet another recap of the game that was posted on espn.com.

Because it was the story of the game, it was the reporter's job to get comments from Duncan. Somehow the reporter also got comments from Crawford, which is unbelievable because I'm pretty sure referees are not supposed to give comments to the media on calls they've made. The story was entertaining because of what both Duncan and Crawford had to say, but at the same time they both made serious speculations about each other and each other's motives in the incident.

Like I said, I personally found the comments entertaining but I thought it might be different to look at some of the quoted bickering from a "pure" journalistic standpoint and whether those quotes may damage public perception of these figures. From a more honest standpoint, I can't wait for a playoff game in which Crawford, who is considered one of the NBA's best officials, is forced to interact with Duncan again. The link to the story is posted above.