NP: Robbie Williams, Sing When You're Winning

My apologies for the glut of Bulls posts. It happens to have caught my attention, so naturally, I've got stuff to say about it.

With that in mind, we turn to last night. While the team may have stopped drinking at halftime -- my initial suspicion after a long string of craptacular third quarters -- I'm now wondering if they've replaced that practice with watching film from the first half, complete with buttered popcorn. Nobody could hang on to the ball in the second half, to the point where it got ridiculous.

Anyway, none of that really mattered, because the Bulls still had a chance to win. Up one point with 17 seconds to go, Eddy Curry inexplicably fouled Michael Finley in the back court, only to be bailed out by a Ben Gordon three-pointer to give the Bulls a two-point advantage. Then Dirk Nowitzki went to the line, made his first free throw, and missed his second. Tyson Chandler neglected to block out Josh Howard for the rebound, and replays showed the ball going off Howard out of bounds, contrary to the ref's call of Dallas ball.

When Chandler was asked about the play after the game, he had this to say:

"I don't want to say nothing about the refs, but I hope they go back and look at that tape and understand the mistake they made. The ball was definitely on [Howard's] hands before it went out of bounds.''

Now, I like bad-mouthing refs for bad calls as much as the next guy, but Scott Skiles was right when the Sun-Times paraphrased his interpretation that Chandler fouled Howard on the arm during the scramble. As a referee, I've made this exact same call, letting the foul go but calling the somewhat contested possession in favor of the team that suffered the foul to compensate. So ultimately, the Bulls got a chance to stop Dallas from scoring on the resulting possession instead of watching helplessly as they shot free throws.

Which they didn't, after a dumb foul and a poor display of fundamentals. So, while, they probably should have won the game, they ultimately didn't deserve to. Hopefully, both big men can learn from their mistakes, and to be fair, how often have we been even able to say "the Bulls should have won that one" in the last couple of years?