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Gentry - The key to winning game 5 to me is to keep our players completely uninvoled from the officiating. With all of the free throw disparity talk in game 3 and game 4 - you know the officiating crew will be calling a tight game for LA. Our players have to stay out of it.

Play hard, play smart. If your going to foul make it count so the refs are forced to decide between hard fouls and ticky tack touch fouls. Be aggresive on offense and be careful of Laker players flopping for charges.

Gentry - you stay on the refs, but tell our players to shut up and play.

Even Phil admitted that we got more fouls because we were more aggressive going to the basket. I don't think it's going to be an issue. I think they'll get some home-court calls but I'm not expecting anything major. To be honest the officiating hasn't been too bad in this series (can't believe I just said that!).

The officiating has been good this series. Suns have shot twice as many free throws as the Lakers, but I don't think it's because the Suns are getting favored calls. Lakers have been playing soft, are taking jumpers, moving away from contact, just not playing physical at all. I'm actually really surprised at the Lakers physicality level and the officiating.

It's all about aggressiveness. Considering we're not one of those "elite" teams in a major city, we've never really had a history calls going our way. If we don't come out aggressive and make the refs make calls, you're going to see calls go to the Lakers just because they are the Lakers. We're just not a team that's going to be given those 50/50 calls so we have to earn them by being aggressive.

Big reason for the foul call difference between the game can be traced to the use of the zone defense. The big reason to use a zone is to force people into taking jump shots. With the Lakers triangle offense not running on with a ball handling point guard they are not good at braking the zone with a drive and dish (this doesn't mean that they cant do this but it is a weakness with this system). With the zone opening up fairly open outside shots the Lakers take them and are not drawing fouls. this is really where the difference between games 1 and 2 vs games 3 and 4. If the Lakers cant find a why to get past our Zone they won't make it into the finals.

Ball movement is the key to drawing fouls. in games 3 and 4 the Lakers just aren't moving the ball. lets hope this doesn't change.

if we are the aggressors we shouldnt have problems with the reffing in LA

ls2ws6 wrote:if we are the aggressors we shouldnt have problems with the reffing in LA

Yeah I don't think so either. I'm surprised to say that I've seen pretty even officiating, even though there have been some terrible calls.

It'd be great for Amare to come out and do what he did in game 3 and get their bigs in foul trouble early.

ls2ws6 wrote:if we are the aggressors we shouldnt have problems with the reffing in LA

+1

I just don't want to see Nash/Amare or anyone else b*tching to the refs while LA runs out on a fast break.