An NBA re-do

I know I don’t blog about the NBA much, but this is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

The NBA granted a protest by the Miami Heat, meaning the last 51 seconds of their December 117-111 loss against the Atlanta Hawks are going to be re-played.

In that game, Shaquille O’Neal fouled out of the game with only five fouls — a foul earlier in the game by Udonis Haslem was given to Shaq. From the NBA press release:

NBA Commissioner David Stern found that the Hawks were grossly negligent in committing this scoring error, since they failed to follow league-mandated scoring procedures and failed to respond effectively when the members of the statisticians’ crew noticed the mistake.

I knew you could put a baseball game under protest and on a rare occasion, play the same game again from the point of the protest (remember the pine tar game?) but I had no idea that you could do this in the NBA.

I’m glad the NBA has this rule, because no team should ever lose a game because of the wrong interpretation of the rules. Bad calls are one thing, that’s something the human eye can miss. But losing because of something like a player fouling out with only 5 fouls is demoralizing and inexcusable.

These teams will play the final 51 seconds over before their regularly-scheduled game on March 8 with the score 114-111.