Knicks Clock Debacle Could Cause Rule Change

While it has been widely established that officials made the correct call by hardwood law, decorated NBA official Steve Javie said that the NBA may look into adjust the rules so strategists like Brunson aren't essentially penalized for shrewd clock management.

"It's a loophole in the rule that they're going to have to close," Javie said during a Saturday appearance on Sirius XM NBA Radio. "I'm sure [the league has] been talking about that ever since that game and whether they're going to change that as the playoffs go on, which is unusual, or change it next year."

While Javie lauded Thursday's officials for getting the call right by law, the optics were certainly suspicious from a Knicks fan's perspective: during the ensuing pause to go to the monitor, get on the phone with the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus, NJ, and find out exactly how much time should've been left, Detroit, which was out of timeouts, was able to draw up a play for its final possession.

The controversy more or less solved itself on the possession in question when Jalen Duren's inbounds pass intended for Cade Cunningham went out of bounds. That allowed the Knicks to finally run out the five tenths left on the clock on their own terms and claim both the 118-116 victory and the 2-1 series lead that came with it.

Several New Yorkers safely laughed about the happening in the aftermath, joking that Detroit-based clock operators were to blame (the league, in actuality, uses third-party timekeepers to avoid those situations entirely). Head coach Tom Thibodeau was hardly humored, firmly declaring that such a situation "should never happen, ever, in a playoff game." (h/t Chris Herring, ESPN).

Javie, now a Catholic deacon and rules analyst for NBA on ESPN broadcasts, noted that the situation could've been even more disastrous for the Knicks: had the Pistons carried a timeout before Brunson's fateful foul line trip, they could've used it to not only draw up a deeper play but even advance the inbound to midcourt.

Even without that caveat, Javie admitted he had never seen such a situation play out on an NBA floor.

"Luckily, nothing really happened to the game," Javie, who had overseen over 1,000 NBA games in his 25-year career as a referee, said. "The outcome should've been what it was, with all that situation."