Salt Lake City, Utah turned ugly on Monday night when fans perceived that the big three defeated the Utah Jazz at home in an ugly fourth quarter marred by technicals and fouls aplenty.

The big three I am speaking of are, of course, Joe Derosa, Ken Mauer, and Steve Javie. The officials.

I think that if the San Antonio Spurs had beaten them without a whole bunch of questionable calls, the fans would have been a bit more cordial if a little disappointed.

I’m not sure why some of the Spurs players were pelted with items when the fan’s real anger should have been directed towards the officiating crew.

Not that there was any excuse for the actions of a few of the Jazz fans.

Who is to say why the officiating crew chose to call the game as they did? Was it the result of a ref being banned indefinitely for poorly refereeing a San Antonio game in the regular season? Were they criticized for benching San Antonio’s star for long periods of time in the previous game? Was it Derek Fisher whining about every call — even the ones that he obviously committed?

Whatever the case, the fans perceived that the Jazz ended up with the short end of the officiating stick. And having watched the game, I have to agree with the fans (without actually condoning throwing items onto the court and at the players or referees). Between the “no-calls” sending Deron Williams sailing into the stands and offensive goal tending not being called (not to mention a whole host of other “questionable” calls on Ginobili alone), the Jazz had it rough.

In the previous three games, it hasn’t seemed quite as bad, with bad calls flying relatively equally in both directions. In some of the previous games involving San Antonio, in fact, I remember telling my wife, “Ooh, that was a bad call. I’m glad I’m not a San Antonio fan. I’d be mad.” I don’t remember ever even thinking that last night.

This has always been a problem with sports (especially professional sports) involving so much contact, with NBA Basketball being the most prominent among them. A member of my fantasy league even took the name “The Game is Rigged”, which seems to be a popular thought of many basketball fans, especially those who love to watch college basketball but have a tough time with the NBA game.

If robots called the game, would the best free throw shooting team win? Or would it come to which team didn’t foul all their players out?

I read a book once where robots did call the game. One of them made a terribly bad call which both sides acknowledged. The team which benefited from the call questioned the captain of the other team about it. The captain shrugged and said something along the lines of “To make the game more realistic, the robots are required to make one BAD, game-changing call per game.”

Although it hurts fans to do it, maybe we should just follow the example of the character in the book and accept the fact that the referees are inevitably going to make bad calls.

I mean, do we really want a perfectly-called game?

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