NBA announces Finals referees

Of course Scott Foster is on the list

The NBA just announced the referees for the NBA Finals. The first instagram comments in response include:

• “Tony brothers should not be allowed in playoffs or finals”

• “All them are 🗑️”

• “I see Scott Foster and Tony Brother there.... Already tilted”

• “Ref’Mafia!!!!!!!”

• “2 shots for Brunson”

So it’s going well.

As we wrote on TrueHoop recently, a dozen of the 16 Finals referees received the highest-possible rating from the Players Association in a recent survey of all players. The exceptions are:

• Tyler Ford and John Goble were voted in the lowest of the three tiers.

• The NBA referee who has called the most Finals games, Scott Foster, ended up in the middle tier, along with alternate Justin Van Dyne.

The Players Association says they shared their findings with the league before the playoffs, along with the recommendation that the league only assign Tier 1 referees to the Finals.

But boy does the league ever love that Scott Foster! Of course he’d get the call …

What’s interesting to me, and perhaps this has been written about elsewhere. But this year’s playoffs are missing David Guthrie. Only five officials have called more Finals games than Guthrie. But he was voted into the second tier by the players, and he made headlines for a big botched call at the buzzer—which he acknowledged was a mistake—in last year’s Pistons/Knicks series. For reasons that I can’t see have been reported anywhere, Guthrie has been absent from this year’s playoffs.

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