Thursday night's Rockets-Warriors game was a beauty, and even East Coast viewers binging on coffee the morning after are smiling. That's because fate intervened and handed Houston a shocking 135-134 win after perhaps the worst missed call of the millennium. When Kevin Durant "saved" the ball with under 30 seconds to go in overtime, he was so out of bounds he might as well have been a spectator:
We're usually loathe to fault refs, who don't have the luxury of multiple replay angles and freeze frame technology in the heat of the moment. Still, the missed call was egregious and the internet wasn't having it.
Of course Joel Embiid chimed in:
Houston's bench did too because they had a pretty good view of KD on the play:
Injured Chris Paul and Rockets GM Daryl Morey took the opportunity to bring up Sandra Bullock's hugely popular Netflix hit, Bird Box, where the movie's characters use blindfolds to avoid the monsters. Get it?
But Houston's GM and CP3 were likely copying what the internet had already joked to death about.
At the podium after the game, Durant was asked if he knew he was out of bounds when he saved the ball. "I could believe it because the refs were missing a lot tonight. They missed a lot in general, so you could easily fool them."
What was KD supposed to do, tell on himself? After the blown call, James Harden knocked down a 3-pointer in Draymond Green's eye with a second left to give the Rockets the win. Everyone patted themselves on the back for chiming in with Rasheed Wallace's oft-quoted epigram, "Ball don't lie." Neither does film, which we're sure Thursday night's refs in the Bay—John Goble, Tony Brown and Tre Maddox—watched a lot of over the last 10 hours.
