So, apparently the call at the end of last night's Bulls game is an issue.
Marco Belinelli, who shook off a rolled right ankle to score a season-high 24 points, missed a 14-foot runner with 92 seconds remaining. But he appeared to save the ball off Roy Hibbert.Instead, officials called the ball out of bounds before Belinelli's save attempt and opted not to use video review.
What nobody (except me, just now, in the comments section of the Trib article) has brought up is that Taj Gibson looked like he pushed the Pacers' Hibbert in the back while going for the rebound. The refs let that go, on the assumption that play looked like it would end with the ball going off of Belinelli and out of bounds to Indiana. Except that it didn't.
It's basically an instantaneous make-up call. Having decided to let the foul by Gibson go, the baseline ref decided to rectify that decision by calling the ball off of Belinelli. The real proper call probably would have been a foul to Gibson and Indiana with the ball, so the Bulls actually ended up coming out ahead.
The alternative, totally reasonable explanation would be if Hibbert had his foot on the end line when Belinelli played the ball off of him, but I don't know that I saw a replay that showed that definitively.
