The entire world saw LeBron James travel Wednesday night.
(If you haven't, watch it below. It's really bad.)
So, how could the referees possibly miss the call?
That's what many are thinking after Wednesday's Los Angeles Lakers-Utah Jazz game. But Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge has a theory that the NBA Referees' Association will appreciate.
"You can see in the clip on Twitter, the referee is not looking at LeBron," Ainge said Thursday on 98.5 The Sports Hub's "Toucher & Rich" during his weekly intervew. "There's no contact between him and the guy that's guarding him, and (the ref) is just looking in another place.
"... It wasn't like they're trying to let LeBron get away with something as much as, nobody at that particular second had their eyes on LeBron dribbling the ball out at half court."
But shouldn't the referee be watching the guy with the ball?
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Ainge offered another defense of officials by sharing an example from a recent Celtics game.
"I was showing my wife and kids, we were watching a Celtics game on the road, and Marcus Smart got hit in the face after he released his shot," Ainge said.
"And I was showing them, 'Look at the referee standing there.' She was looking at the shot up high. You can see her head looking right at the hands to see that Marcus wasn't hit -- which he wasn't -- and then her head immediately went to the feet to make sure that the defender wasn't coming underneath him. So she was concentrating on that while the guy was hitting Marcus across the head."
Ainge's point: Officials can't watch everything all at once, and the result is the occasional missed call.
In James' case, it was an egregious missed call that officials probably should have seen anyway. But as long as those calls aren't made against his Celtics, Ainge can have some sympathy for the stripes.
"I'm not making excuses for the referees," Ainge added. "It's just, refereeing is really hard. ... I think there's a lot of missed calls. That's a nature of our profession and I don't think it's going to change."
Don't miss NBC Sports Boston's coverage of Celtics-Nuggets, which tips off Friday at 7 p.m. with Celtics Pregame Live, and then Mike & Tommy have the call at 8 p.m. You can also stream the game on the MyTeams App.
