It is common for a coach to be expelled during a match, out of frustration or anger. Sometimes, it's even a tactic to wake up your troops. This isn't always the desired effect, but it can work like that. So it is for Mike Brown in Milwaukee.
The Kings coach was sent off nine minutes from time after taking his anger out on referee Intae Hwang. His players were forced to hold him back, so furious was the former Warriors assistant.
“It was a good tactic because his team then came back”, notes Adrian Griffin for ESPN. The Kings were in fact 12 points behind at this point in the game. They will come back, snatch extension, before finally seeing Damian Lillard shoot them down at the buzzer.
But it wasn't comedy. Mike Brown was truly angry with the officials. The proof: at a press conference after the match, he did not hesitate to have a laptop carried to show journalists the referees' errors. A scene already less banal…
“Referees are human, they will make mistakes, but we hope for consistency and communication between them,” he explains to ESPN. “They were excellent tonight, they talked with me all evening. But in terms of consistency, as you saw, in my opinion, the account was not there. »
More free throws for the Bucks
Among the sequences isolated by Mike Brown, we find a foul awarded to Damian Lillard, who thus obtains three free throws, in the third quarter, which he compares to an absence of a whistle in the last act on De'Aaron Fox .
In addition, if the Bucks committed more fouls than the Kings (22 against 19), the 2021 champions shot 12 more free throws. But this gap does not explain Sacramento's defeat.
The coach knows that his players had the opportunity to kill the game in overtime and that with a four-point lead with 18 seconds to go, with two attempts to come on the line, the matter must be in the bag . With victory in his pocket, he probably wouldn't have taken out his computer…
“We had a chance to win and we couldn’t finish,” he regrets. “But I say it: dealing with this inconsistency in the whistles is hard. It's complicated to live with. »
