High-class games, unpleasant refereeing mistakes: The world federation FIBA is coming under increasing pressure at the European Basketball Championships. The players refrain from clear criticism, but the disgruntlement is obvious.
The basketball world federation FIBA is getting into more and more trouble explaining itself at the pan-European European Championship. In stark contrast to the exciting and rousing games in the preliminary round groups, there have been rather unusual mishaps with the referees and the technology in the past few days for a major tournament.
In Germany’s match against Lithuania, the referees forgot to call a free throw for the Lithuanians after a technical foul by the Germans. In Georgia’s match against Turkey, the clock mistakenly ran on for 22 seconds even though the game was stopped. The problem: Both games went into overtime twice each, so the officials’ small mistakes were potentially decisive for the outcome of the matches.
Luka Doncic said of the recent series of errors, “I think you see it yourselves: The case with the time in the Turkey game, the technical foul here with Lithuania. That’s something that FIBA takes care of, so I don’t have anything to say about that.” The Dallas Mavericks’ point guard grinned a little to himself, but refrained from more explicit criticism of the officials.
Decisions are announced late
Germany’s Daniel Theis was unhappy with the role of the referees after the 109-107 win over Lithuania. “That’s where I have to watch what I say now. Maybe you can see from that that the referees are too busy with themselves to find their own line and then something like that is forgotten,” Theis said on MagentaSport.
The protests of Lithuania and Turkey were dismissed. In the case of the Lithuanians, it was said that this was not done within the necessary time frame and that the reason was not sufficient. In the second case, the officials justified the decision by saying that Turkey could not prove that there would certainly have been a different result without the timekeeping glitch. FIBA was also criticised for the length of the decisions. The dismissal of the Lithuanians’ protest was announced at 1.00 a.m., almost 24 hours passed until the decision in the Turkey case.
