NBA says Golden State's winning basket against Bulls shouldn't have happened
The Bulls got a double dose of bad news when the NBA sent out the regular "Last two minute report," evaluating the referees' calls at the end of Sunday's loss to Golden State.
The league decided not only should the Warriors have been called for a 5-second inbound violation before the game-winning basket, there was also an illegal screen set by Kevon Looney against Wendell Carter Jr., which went uncalled.
The Bulls did a good job of guarding the inbounds pass and when the Warriors finally got it in, inbounder Damion Lee ran to the top of the key and hit the game-winning 3-pointer over Tomas Satoransky.
Actually, that wasn't the end of it. The report said LaVine should have gone to the foul line with 34.4 seconds left on a foul by Kelly Oubre. It wasn't called and the defensive stop set up Golden State's tying basket with 16.9 seconds remaining.
Asked about the report before Tuesday's game in Washington, Bulls coach Billy Donovan didn't want to look back in anger.
"I think it's a very difficult situation to put the officials in," Donovan said. "There's going to be missed calls. There's things as coaches you want back, as players you want back. I get the transparency piece and I get the part of trying to be open and honest.
"It's unfortunate, I actually thought we guarded the play fairly well. When Sato jumped (at the inbound pass), his man was able to kind of get a step on him. It's going to happen. I've been on both sides of it. I think we've got to look at the stuff we can control. We turned the ball over 24 times, we had an opportunity to get a couple defensive rebounds late and we didn't."