Why the referees not calling a flagrant foul for Kevin Love’s elbow is worse than most missed calls

The NBA announced Wednesday that officials missed a couple of calls at the end of Game 1 between the Raptors and Cavaliers. The headline grabber came with a penalty: the league upgraded Kevin Love’s elbow-swinging foul on DeMar DeRozan with 1:11 left in the game to a Flagrant 1. It had been called a common foul Tuesday night.

The Raptors led, 105-103, at that point in the game. It was Cleveland’s first foul in the last two minutes, so Toronto simply gained possession with the foul call. In that final 71 seconds of regulation, the Raptors missed six shots. The Cavaliers won in overtime.

But had officials called that flagrant foul during the game, DeRozan would have received two free throws before Toronto inbounded the ball. DeRozan is an 82 percent free-throw shooter. Had the refs made the right call, Toronto likely would have had a three- or four-point lead when Cleveland got the ball back with about 45 seconds to go. The entire complexion of the game would have changed. The likelihood the Raptors would have won is much higher with that extra point or two.

There’s a twist: the league’s post-game report also indicates that officials missed a foul on DeRozan immediately before the elbow. Love captured the offensive rebound, DeRozan reached in (which was a missed call), Love swung the elbow and connected (which was called a foul but should have a flagrant). The argument goes that this is actually the critical bad call because if the refs had whistled DeRozan for the reach-in, Love would never have swung and we wouldn’t be talking about the missed flagrant because it wouldn’t have happened. Without the call favoring DeRozan, the call favoring the Cavaliers would never have happened.

This argument does not hold much water.

The incorrect non-call, as the NBA names it, on DeRozan is one of those highly subjective, unevenly enforced infractions. It’s not a reviewable play. Either the ref calls it when they see it, or they let it go. In the final two minutes of a close playoff game, officials tend to let those calls go. League officials determined after the fact that DeRozan should have been whistled. But in the grand scale of basketball injustices, this is pretty light.

An elbow to a player’s chops is completely different.

Contact to the head is reviewable, and play had been stopped because the officials whistled Love for a foul. The officials knew Love hit DeRozan because they called him for a foul. Love clearly made contact with the head. There is no reason the officials should not have reviewed the play and made the obvious call that it was a flagrant foul.

This is a big reason the NBA has a central replay center ready to deliver the clips from all angles to those little courtside monitors officials peer into. Officials use replay to review questionably hard fouls and blows to the head all the time, often to the chagrin of in-game analysts who bemoan the state of the NBA where an old-school “hard foul” might be considered a flagrant.

Missing or ignoring the foul DeRozan committed is completely acceptable. Officials are human, many infractions are subjective, and we trust refs to use their judgment. But given the mandate NBA officials have to protect player health and punish unnecessary contact to the head, and given the replay resources and latitude the officials have been given, the missed flagrant is rather inexcusable.

There’s nothing the Raptors can do now, of course. The upgraded flagrant foul doesn’t come with retroactive free throws or a do-over. And of course, Toronto didn’t lose because of the missed flagrant: they lost for a hundred reasons, of which the bad call is but one.

Still, that’s a mistake the NBA is equipped to avoid making, and yet it didn’t. We should acknowledge that because it is true.