Jazz trainer Gary Briggs got a technical foul while attending to Alec Burks, who’d just been flagrantly fouled by Arron Afflalo.
What did Briggs do wrong?
I couldn’t find anything – and apparently the league couldn’t, either.
The NBA is rescinding Briggs’ technical, according to a league spokesman. No specific reason was given, but the NBA rescinding technicals is hardly abnormal.
Unfortunately for the Jazz, Monday’s result – Denver 103, Utah 101 – will stand.
Ty Lawson made the technical free throw, putting the Nuggets up five with 5:55 left. Think the game might have played out differently if Denver were up just four?
Though I wouldn’t expect them to win a protest, the Jazz might have a greater of chance of getting the result overturned than the Kings did on a protest filed earlier this season. The NBA denied Sacramento’s protest because the league ruled proper procedures were followed in that game.
This might be a case of rules being misapplied.
Jazz coach Quin Snyder accepted blame for not calling a timeout that would have allowed Briggs onto the court, but rules say a timeout isn’t necessary when a player is injured as a result of a flagrant foul.
The rule that penalizes people for leaving the bench during an altercation – the Jazz and Nuggets were jawing after the foul – applies only to players (though only head and assistant coaches are explicitly excluded).
Again, the NBA isn’t specifying why the technical foul was rescinded. We don’t even know why the technical foul was called in the first place.
But the Jazz should at least kick around the idea of protesting, even if filing a protest that gets defeated would cost them $10,000. They’d have to submit the protest by tonight, 48 hours after Monday’s game ended.
That said, I doubt they’d win. In announcing the Kings’ failed protest, the NBA described overturning a game’s result as an “extraordinary remedy.” A history of the league rescinding technicals without changing the game’s result suggests an “extraordinary remedy” is not justified here.
However, many of those overturned technicals were based on cooler heads assessing the situation in an office rather than on the court. This one could be due to a misapplied rule, which could create a substantially different situation.
Briggs will no longer have the technical on his record. That’s for certain.
The Nuggets still beat the Jazz. That’s highly probable, though not totally certain.
