Plus “interpretive” foul calls – something must have happened.

Raps seem to be on the losing side of these types of calls far too often.

Guys like Wade make a living off of them.

It still remember the first time I had good seats at a Raptors game and could see what the guys where doing on the floor. Players used their body or their opponents body to shield their actions – many players had a handful of jersey on nearly every play. It is a hard game to call. (We miss Reggie – he’s good at this)

Seems unlikely Foster is really ready to play many minutes tonight.

Bad news about Evans has been good news for Johnson. It was hard to see how Johnson would get minutes behind both Evans and Rasho – but with Evans out, Amir has gotten his chance to shine! And Amir has been looking better each week Evans sits out.

(edited link. it was posted yesterday: http://ei.ca/ff6lG )

Among other items, it shows that refs generally even things up by the end of most games. “The take-home message for coaches: The more aggressive your teams the better because, in the end, the foul count is going to be about even no matter what.”

It also shows that “the probability of a foul being called on the visiting team was 7 per cent higher than on the home team”.

This might explain why the Raptors seem to get the short end on foul calls as often as they do. For most of the referees, even when it’s a home game for the Raptors, the refs might be unconsciously pulling for their own ‘home-country’ team somewhat (not unreasonable to suppose) … and when a player like say, Bargnani, has a foul called like one or two of the fouls that he was charged with this past Sunday (that to my eyes, were not fouls), maybe it’s a little bit of ‘foreign player on a foreign team’ syndrome that we’re seeing.

Like the article says, it’s a very hard game to officiate, but … maybe there’s an argument here to seriously consider a ‘challenge’ system like they have in the NFL (and in tennis), where a coach can gamble a time-out in exchange for a review of the call. We have the technology to be able to do it quickly, and if used wisely – which it would be as coaches wouldn’t be likely to needlessly fritter away time-outs – eventually, we’d see better-called games and less bad foul-calls that (can easily) change game outcomes. Just saying.

Against every other team Troy Murphy is a bench player. Against us, he is an assassin. Great.