The Golden State Warriors fell to the Denver Nuggets, 119-115, on Tuesday night in a game that may eventually have a big impact on Western Conference playoff seeding. After the game Steve Kerr was not happy and let loose on the last-second sequence that could have changed everything if only the officials had seen what he saw.
Down four points with just a few ticks left to play, Kerr had watched Denver's Christian Braun dive for a loose ball and then quickly signal for a timeout. That would have been a major problem for the Nuggets as they had exhausted their supply of timeouts at that point. But it turned out to be nothing because not a single ref believed Braun was calling a timeout.
"Everybody saw it except for the three guys we hire to do the games, and that makes me angry," Kerr told reporters. "That's a technical foul. They don't have a timeout left. It's a technical foul, we shoot a free throw, we get the ball, we got a chance to win the game. They all told me they didn't see it... With that said, that's not why we lost. We lost because we didn't close. Again."
With the loss the Warriors fall to 12-8 on the year, which is currently good for 7th in the West. Kerr was not just unhappy about the late non-call after the game, laying out several problems with the way his team played.
Reading into this it seems like the no timeout call was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. Reasonable minds can definitely disagree if Braun completed the process of signaling for a timeout or if it just sort of looked like that as he tried to secure a loose ball.
