“NBA withdraws Victor Wembanyama from Hawks game on technicality”

The NBA announced it has overturned the technical foul against Victor Wembanyama with 11 seconds left in the fourth quarter of Friday’s win over the Hawks. The call was part of a double technical awarded to him and DeAndre Hunter after Hunter Wemby finished with a high-flying dunk to end the game. Then Hunter stared at him as he lay on the ground, and the two began to talk as Wemby stood up again.

Without knowing what Wemby had said, it seemed like a joke to the referees to call the double strike a technical as he apparently didn’t deserve to just react and not let things escalate further after Hunter’s actions. Most likely the referees didn’t want a technical free throw to be the game-winner, so they took the easy way out since they had to call something.

Well, as it turns out, according to the NBA, they made the wrong decision. By overturning Wemby’s technical, but not Hunter’s, the league is acknowledging that Wemby did nothing wrong, but Hunter deserved the technical. That means the Spurs should have made a free throw and then got the ball back with the lead. The result likely would have been a Hawks foul and two Spurs free throws before the Hawks had a chance to force overtime. Instead, the game was still tied after Hunters Tech, the Spurs turned the ball over and the Hawks had a chance to win it in regulation time. Luckily they failed and Spurs took the lead in extra time, especially Wemby after Hunter poked the bear and gave him an extra dose of determination.

Even though the Spurs caused themselves a lot of stress last night by not playing great defense and wasting their own shot at the winning goal by losing the ball, it’s probably still a relief for the referees that they won in the end, otherwise they would have they get a chance much more sloppily than they did because they were able to get the call out of the way with a double technical call instead of what should have just been a technical call against Hunter, which again could have changed the result. Sometimes the referees get lucky too.