Don't forget that tomorrow, the infamous 51-second replay between the Hawks and the Heat, inspired a botched bit of Atlanta scorekeeping back before Christmas, will finally occur.
A lot of people are really worried about the fact that those two teams have changed a lot since they last met.
On Slate, John Swansburg makes an impassioned case that this replay is, for a number of reasons, a sham. This guy has been traded to Phoenix, that guy is in the D-League, and maybe Pat Riley would have benched Shaquille O'Neal for those vital seconds anyway.
I couldn't care less. I see it just like if a player twists his ankle in the second quarter. No, that dude can't play in the second half, but his team is still there, and in the end it's a contest between those two team entities.
One of those entities -- the Heat -- was badly wronged by a scorekeeper's error. So that organization gets another crack at it. End of story.
(And one side note: as someone who has run his own small business, I can tell you that the talk about bringing back traded players must stop. There is no way in freaking hell Shaquille O'Neal, a delicate and expensive asset of the Phoenix Suns, is going to enter battle on behalf of his ex-employer the Miami Heat. No matter what kind of insurance could be acquired, if O'Neal were hurt during that time, the legal fees and general hassles that resulted would be infinite and painful.)
If anything about this is fishy it's in an arbitrary application of the right to award a do-over. Lots of close games through the years have involved mistakes of various kinds that could have, in theory, affected outcomes. The normal thought through most of my life has been "done is good" and you move on.
In any case, Swansburg's article has a little sidebar telling the story of the last NBA do-over. I reprint it here, really just to celebrate the extraordinary cunning of Norm Nixon.
On Nov. 30, 1982, the Lakers defeated the Spurs in double overtime.
With three seconds remaining in regulation and the Lakers trailing by 3, tricky Norm Nixon had gone to the line to shoot 2 for Los Angeles. He made the first but then faked his second free throw, drawing players from both teams into the lane.
The refs called a double lane violation and ordered a jump ball. The Lakers won the jump, Nixon hit a field goal, the game went into overtime, and the Lakers ultimately won. But since Nixon never released the ball when faking his free throw, there never should have been a lane violation-the refs should have just made Norm shoot his freebie.
The Lakers and Spurs thus replayed the final three seconds of regulation in April 1983. This time around, the Spurs prevailed, 117-114.
