Kevin Durant said he thinks the NBA’s L2M report is damaging to how we view officials. Now, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr is letting his opinion be known on the end-of-game white papers produced to cover referees at the end of NBA games.
According to a story from USA Today’s Sam Amick, Kerr does not hold the last two minute report in high esteem and said he thinks the “feel” has diminished from the league’s officiating.
I’m not a huge fan of the two-minute report myself,” Kerr began. “It does put the refs in a tough spot. I don’t know what it accomplishes, but I do appreciate that the league is trying to be transparent about what they’re looking at, and how the refs are judged and all that. But I’m not sure to what extent it really helps anybody.
From what I gather, every official is graded on every call. There’s too much gray area in basketball. I don’t believe that you can just say that every call is right or wrong. I think there’s a feel element that’s lacking right now. I could give you a lot of examples, but I just think that there should be more feel involved.
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I think they’re taking a very systematic approach, and trying to make it perfect when it’s absolutely an imperfect world we live in.
This is an interesting angle for Kerr to take, and there’s lots of reasons for to give it at this juncture.
First, as has been suggested, Durant could have made his comments to endear himself to officials moving forward after a disastrous end to the Warriors’ Christmas Day game with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
And while some teams are reportedly looking to extend the L2M report to cover the entire game, there’s also been significant friction generated from them as officials have publicly and officially repudiated them in the past.
Kerr could be simply siding with his newest superstar, or he feels as though there needs to be a strong shift back to officiating of years past, or maybe it’s a little of both.
Still, I think where the L2M goes in the next couple of years will be interesting to see. It seems as though it’s ripe for tweaking or elimination altogether, and it’s not immediately clear which one it will be.
