Don’t cry over officiating nightmare, Spurs won’t

If you want to wring your hands, feel free. You can cry into your cereal, post tweets or website comments of outrage, kick, yell, scream … do whatever you want in the wake of Monday night’s officiating chaos at the end of Spurs-Thunder Game 2. The uncalled offensive foul on Dion Waiters — which head referee Ken Mauer said is a play he’d “never seen before” in a post-game comment to a pool report — was blatant and the biggest missed call in a sequence that featured what we tracked as eight missed calls on one sequence.

As the dust settles after … whatever that was Monday night … there will be calls for changes to officiating. People will scream about the two-minute report and how it doesn’t actually do anything, even though it’s a major step in the league’s effort to be transparent in the calls they get right and wrong. Thunder and Spurs fans will trade accusations. (“Manu stepped over the line!” “LaMarcus Aldridge was held on the offensive rebound!”) You know what none of this changes?

The Spurs lost. It’s 1-1. Game 3 is Friday, and we’ve got at least three more games of this series to play.

But before you head off to climb your high horse and vent about the “disgrace” that is officiating or how the NBA is “rigged,” you should know something.

The Spurs are not going to focus on that play. They’re not going to moan and wail at the moon. That is part of what makes this the best organization in sports; it’s why they’ve had so much success, won so many titles. They were mad last night, with Gregg Popovich tearing the officiating crew an entirely new set of orifices as he walked off the floor, and Manu Ginobili expressing frustration at the no-call. But by Tuesday afternoon? They’ll be over it and focusing on what they need to do better in Game 3. We’ll talk about that in a minute.

In the Spurs’ locker room, there’s this plaque. It’s in multiple languages so the Spurs’ various international players can read it. It’s from the poet Jacob Riis, and it defines the team’s entire approach to their organization.

“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

It’s about how it’s never one thing, and about how it’s not the result that matters, but the process that goes into it. Game 2 wasn’t about the final play. It’s never about the final play.

“I don’t know what should’ve been called or if it should have been called anything. They’re going to say it and it doesn’t matter, it’s over. I’m not going to be able to change it. Nobody’s going to change it,” Manu Ginobili said after the game.

“With all that, we complain about that because that’s what we do. We had the ball. We had a great shot. We had a few other opportunities, so it’s things that …

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