Crawford should have been fired. The refs in the NBA are the worst of any sport and they decide games too much.
I'm never sure how, every year, I can watch a college basketball postseason and an NBA postseason, and have completely different feelings about basketball refs, their biases, and their influence, meddling, and relevance in the game.
I think basketball is easily the hardest sport to officiate, its so fast paced, there are so many plays per game, and the game itself blurs the line between contact and non-contact sport and puts a big burden on refs to police that gray area, so that a huge percentage of what a basketball ref is looking at at any given moment is not cut-and-dried, but is a pure judgement call. And despite all that, college refs do well enough that you don't think about them much, while NBA refs leave the taste of shit in your mouth every game.
The NBA and its whole superstar marketing and culture just stinks and sets up the opportunity for officials to exert their control to influence who wins. There's some natural referee bias toward great players in every sport, but the NBA goes way beyond that. They lost whatever superstar vs. team balance they had when Magic and Bird faded away. The term "superstar" even irks me -- what other sport routinely refers to their great players as superstars? What other sport calls players "role players?" (For the ATOT youngsters, that term didn't even exist until #23 showed up in Chicago.) It's all about a handful of individual players in the NBA, not teams.
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