TB wrote:Now I will admit, without getting tin foil hat crazy, that there are a handful of challenges (mostly against Steph) that left my jaw on the floor that they didn't go Kerr's way... like obvious ones that seemed shady to not give to the Warriors. But the majority of his challenges I instantly say to myself "why challenge that" or "why is he not challenging that".
The NBA challenge system was broken from the beginning. It only exists to placate angry fans because "hey look guys, there's totally a process in place to stop our league's horrible refereeing problem from affecting games!!!!" while simultaneously legitimizing the onslaught bad judgement calls.
It was the exact same sh*tshow when the NFL allowed challenges to pass interference. They just continuously refused to overturn missed or egregiously bad judgement calls under the guise of "lacks clear and obvious evidence to overturn". It's a impossible standard to uphold on judgement calls.
If there's 5% reason to confirm and 95% reason to overturn, they will confirm almost every time. The slightest touch anywhere on a shooter can be considered a foul and will be enough to uphold a call, even though defenders get away with lots contact on most contested shots. Same with blocking calls - the slightest lower body movement can be used to justify a blocking call even though it's impossible to be 100% stationary even in the best charge-taking defensive positions.
So I can see how some NBA staffs might think there's no point in burning an early challenge unless it's something completely unambiguous like an out-of-bounds call in plain camera view; otherwise, best to just save the challenge until the end of the game when you might need it to overturn an obvious non-judgement call, or on the odd chance you might actually get a judgement foul overturned with the game on the line. And if that's the staff's strategy, they're probably going to lose a higher percentages of challenges, knowing that many of those end-of-game challenges will be longshots.