I just wanted to link a pair of articles that address the current state of officiating. The first one is your typical Bill Simmons "The Refs are screwing up everything" type of article -- though it does have some interesting history thrown in -- and the second is John Hollinger's take on *why* the officiating appears so bad.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/090528&sportCat=nba
I had written something similar to Hollinger yesterday on SS&R about the how the way game 5 was called was more beneficial to the Lakers' style of play than to the Nuggets' style of play (without saying that the calls were one-sided) but all they had to say was that the Nuggets shouldn't whine about officiating because they got the whistle in game 4. Go figure.
