The Golden State Warriors led the hosting Los Angeles Lakers 124-120 on Saturday night, when Steph Curry missed a three-pointer with around 1:52 left to play. Three players went up for the high-arcing rebound, the ball deflected out of bounds off somebody's hand with 1:50 on the clock, and the entire arena descended into the Hell Of Clocks And Rulebooks. If not among the worst of the hells, then certainly among the more annoying.
During the stoppage Lakers coach Darvin Ham challenged the referee's ruling that the ball had gone out off a Los Angeles player. Somehow, during the ensuing review, the officials wound up examining a different play, from a minute earlier, when LeBron James shot and made an off-balance corner three-pointer, to see whether LeBron had accidentally stepped on the out-of-bounds line on his way up to shoot. Their ruling: He had. Hilariously, they also ruled in Ham's favor on the out-of-bounds play, meaning the Lakers "won" a replay review that reduced their score by three points.
One might have hoped the game would return to something like normal at this point, but that simply could not be accomplished in the Hell Of Clocks And Rulebooks. Golden State's Andrew Wiggins won the ensuing jump-ball and tipped it to Draymond Green on the baseline, leading to yet another challenge from Ham and another video review, to determine whether Green had been out of bounds as he tried to take control of the ball. The ruling: He had.
Now the game could be allowed to return to normal! Or could it???? The Lakers had scarcely inbounded the ball when a whistle stopped play again; LeBron, frustrated, pounded the ball on the court. The 24-second clock had malfunctioned.
The Lakers inbounded the ball again. The whistle blew again. The 24-second clock had malfunctioned.
The Lakers inbounded the ball again. The whistle blew again. The 24-second clock had malfunctioned.
The Lakers inbounded the ball again. The whistle blew again. The 24-second clock had malfunctioned.
The Lakers inbounded the ball again. The whistle blew again. The 24-second clock had malfunctioned.
The shot clock simply was not counting down the seconds. After each whistle-blow, crew chief David Guthrie would have it reset to however many seconds should be left in the Lakers' possession, and the Lakers would inbound the ball, and the clock would simply stay on that number, instead of counting down. Then they'd blow the whistle to stop play and go deal with the clock situation some more. Some number of commercial breaks interrupted the tedium, with more tedium.
At this point, after five failed attempts at restarting play and some number of long agonizing minutes that only felt like 20 years, the officials fell back to their backup option: A stopwatch, with arena announcer Lawrence Tanter counting down the seconds over the public-address system. Officially, less than 30 seconds of game-time had elapsed since Curry attempted that three-pointer way back up at the beginning of this sequence, what certainly by then felt like a lifetime ago.
The Lakers, with the benefit of, I dunno, six months of stoppage to draw up a good play, naturally went with having LeBron dribble and dribble and dribble and dribble, as if to underline the purgatorial endlessness of this basketball exhibition. Curry poked the ball away from him and stole it. He passed to Green; Green took a couple dribbles toward the hoop and tossed up a lob for Jonathan Kuminga, who dunked it, to give the Warriors a nine-point lead.
A quarter of an hour had gone by. Less than a minute of basketball had been played. The score of the game had gone down by one point. And I, watching on television, had come to an important conclusion: It was time for bed.
