The Refs Are Not Trying to Screw You

Here’s a question: Does knowing a bad call went against your team — knowing, for sure, that you got screwed — make you feel better? Does that information enhance your life? Does it bring you any sort of peace?

On Sunday afternoon, the New York Knicks won game four of their endlessly entertaining, ’90s-sharp-elbows throwback series over the Detroit Pistons, 94–93. They won because Jalen Brunson recovered from an injured ankle to have a brilliant fourth quarter, because Karl-Anthony Towns hit an unfathomable step-back 3-pointer (which sent Spike Lee, who is 68 years old, into apoplexy), and because Pistons star Cade Cunningham missed a shot with three seconds left that would have handed the game to Detroit.

But those are basketball reasons, which is to say that they are boring. These reasons do not provide the reliable dopamine and endorphin hits that aggrievement provides, and do not feed into the increasingly default American sensation that larger forces have conspired against us to take away something we want. Thus, no one focuses on basketball reasons. They focus on a bad call.

The last play of the Knicks game involved the Pistons’ Tim Hardaway Jr. (a former Knick) shooting a 3-pointer at the buzzer and appearing to be fouled by Josh Hart. But the referees did not call anything, time expired, and the Knicks won. Knicks fans got a 3–1 series lead and everyone else got to be performatively angry. That anger, as always, was directed at the referees, who were alternately (a) trying to engineer a victory for the big-market Knicks; (b) being paid off by gamblers; (c) incompetent; (d) just plain assholes. We want to feel like something has been taken from us. But, just as much, we want someone to scream at it about — someone to blame.

Hart did appear to foul Hardaway on the play. (The NBA, in its almost existentially pointless “two-minute report,” agreed afterward.) So there: We have proof that the Pistons lost because a call that should have been made wasn’t. Right? Well, sure, but uh, look what happened about a second and a half before Hardaway’s shot:

Josh Hart was fouled pic.twitter.com/OSZJo17D8X

— New York Basketball (@NBA_NewYork) April 28, 2025

That’s Pistons forward Tobias Harris rather clearly fouling Hart on the rebound. Should the refs have called it? That would have put Hart at the free-throw line with two seconds left, ensuring the Knicks’ victory. So did New York actually get screwed here?

The point isn’t that the refs should have called the Harris foul or the Hardaway foul. The point is that there is no definitive, single reason one team wins over another. The point is that we can play this game all day. If I want the Knicks to win, hey, they should have called the foul on Harris. If I want the Knicks to lose, they should have called it on Hart. Either way, I feel morally justified.

Part of the problem is that we have become so partisan and siloed in our sports fandom (and our lives) that fans can always talk ourselves into somehow deserving to win. That sort of partisanship is hardly new, and complaining about the refs has been a part of sports since the beginning. But I wonder if omnipresent technology — which ostensibly exists to resolve these sort of irrational, self-aggrandizing turf wars — is actually making all of this worse. When replay review was initially instituted in the camera-heavy NFL, the concept was simple: Use replay to reverse the most egregious calls, to correct with technology what humans cannot measure with their biological limitations. Don Denkinger’s call in game six of the 1985 World Series? Colorado’s fifth down? The Jeffrey Maier play? With replay, we would no longer suffer knowing that one blown call could change history. We could make it right.

This is not how it has turned out. Replay hasn’t made anyone feel better about anything; it has just become something else to rile us up. Yes, incorrect calls get overturned on a regular basis, but, just as often, replays don’t give us any definitive answer and just force us to go back to our corners and continue fighting and feeling upset. It has offered the illusion of total clarity when such a thing is often impossible. It has been used not as an arbiter of fairness but instead as evidence of corruption. (If a ref missed a call before, we could say it was simply a mistake. Now we scream that their inability to accept what we claim is inherent video truth is proof of malfeasance — that they’re rigging it.) And worst of all: It is not halting controversy; it is exacerbating it.

This doesn’t apply only to replay review. Take the K-Box, that little superimposed zone behind home plate you see during baseball games. The concept is simple in theory: If the ball lands inside the box, it’s a strike, and if it lands outside the box, it’s a ball. But in practice, all it does is give us something to get mad about. Before the box, if a pitch was close to a strike but called a ball, we could have a moment of frustration, but in the end, all you could do is shrug: It was a close call and it didn’t go our way. But now? Now every pitch the umpire calls differently than the K-Box is infuriating. It’s a little box that exists only to piss you off — to feel as if you have been wronged, little droplets of aggrievement interjected sporadically throughout the otherwise calming sensation of watching a baseball game. This box is particularly galling, because it is in fact not definitive. It’s just a broadcast creation, with whatever network you are watching imposing what it believes the strike zone is on its telecast, regardless of the actual rules. That was proven during this year’s spring training, when MLB, as reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, introduced its Automatic Ball-Strike System (or ABS or “robo umps”), which contrasted with what networks have been showing for years. “The strike-zone box that we display on broadcasts and our app probably is inconsistent with the way we currently do it with the challenge system,” said an MLB executive. The box is just there to piss you off. And the aggrievement it and other technological innovations foster — the illusion that there is a right answer, and that we can find it, and the very real belief from most fans that the only “right” answer is the one that benefits specifically their team — is pervasive.

We’re teaching whole generations to think this way. One of the more amusing yet ominous things I’ve been noticing in Little League games is the way kids respond to calls that went against them. I have repeatedly seen preteens who believe they’re the victim of a mistaken call put their hands over their ears or spin their finger in the air — the universal symbol for “let’s go to the video replay.” You almost feel bad informing them that, alas, this Little League diamond, a dirt field out in the middle of rural Georgia, does not in fact have Statcast-enabled technology. But they’re not searching for a definitive look anyway. They just want to be right. Even if we’re wrong, we’ll find a way to make ourselves right.

And so much of this comes down to the referees and umpires who, I feel obliged to point out, are in fact not personally biased against your team or any team. They are not paid by the league to give breaks to popular big-market teams; they are not gambling on these games. They’re just human beings whose humanity was so offensive to fans and leagues that we dedicated ourselves to enhancing technology to correct their errors only to learn that replay only brings more controversies and somehow makes us more furious at these human beings than we were in the first place.

The problem is that we don’t want truth and accuracy from our calls — not really. We really just want to win, or, if we lose, to have someone to blame other than ourselves. The late baseball umpire Ron Luciano once wrote that the job of umpiring was “best described as the profession of standing between two 7-year-olds with one ice-cream cone.” You can call the foul on Hart or you can call the foul on Harris. Both are right. Both are wrong. But either way: Someone is pissed they’re not getting the ice-cream cone.