Two familiar things happened on Thursday night: Trae Young had a huge statistical game, and the Hawks, now 26-30 on the season, lost. Young finished with 38 points but it wasn’t enough as the Orlando Magic prevailed 114-108.
And after the game, Young, in another point of NBA familiarity, voiced his displeasure with, you guessed it, the refs.
Predictably, Young, who was hit with a technical foul early in the fourth quarter, thinks the officials did a bad job. I know, it’s shocking. A player from a losing team believes the refs are out to get him. In fact, Young thinks certain officials have a personal beef with him and are not communicating with him and are officiating him unfairly.
“[The Magic] shot 10 more free throws than us, and I mean I feel like if you ask around the league, you would know they’re probably a more physical team than we are,” Young said. “And the way we drove, even some of the guys were laughing when they weren’t calling fouls for me. It’s just frustrating.
“It’s personal for some of these refs,” Young continued. “Some stuff that fans don’t even get to hear, when you get to see it in their calls and their actions and things like that.
“… You just wish that you could get some refs that just don’t take things personally and understand that people grow. I’m not 19 [years old] anymore. I can communicate with these people, and I have with a lot of these refs and I feel like the refs are responsive for the most part. But then you get a few, a handful, like we got tonight. They just take shit personally, and you can see it by the way they make their calls.”
Young has a reputation of hunting for foul calls
A couple things here. First, when Young says the Magic are the more physical team, which is true, and he thinks he’s making a case as to why that should lead to more fouls being called on them than the Hawks, he’s actually arguing against himself. Anyone who has played or even just watched enough basketball to understand the difference between theoretical and practical officiating knows that it’s the more assertive, forceful team that typically ends up getting the benefit of a friendlier whistle. Nobody is going to throw you a free-throw parade just because you’re the softer, more passive team. If you want calls, for the most part, you earn them with force.
Warriors fans always gripe about this with Stephen Curry, whom they believe doesn’t get the same benefit of the doubt from officials that other superstars get. It’s true off ball, where he gets held like crazy, but off-ball fouls aren’t called as often for any player. On ball, Curry simply doesn’t initiate contact well. He thinks he can just sort of flail in the presence of defenders and get a call, when in actuality he ends up making it even more clear that he wasn’t fouled. He’s not a forceful player, and neither is Young.
What Young is, however, is one of the all-time foul grifters. He has been stealing bogus calls for years and now he thinks he’s entitled to benefit of the 50-50 whistle? That’s not how it works.
If you go out of your way to trick officials into looking stupid for years, of course they are going to be more hesitant to give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s not necessarily personal, although you can’t rule that element out (go ask Chris Paul about Scott Foster), but it’s simply a ref taking the “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” approach.
If Young actually is suffering from this sort of officiating inequity, as he so unoriginally claims, he dug his own hole. Do you know how many defenders have been hit with absolute BS fouls while trying to defend Young as he slams on the brakes in front of them like a car stopping short as part of an rear-end insurance scam? Countless.
Young has been flopping and flailing virtually his entire career, and now he just wants things to be fair? Interesting.
