Officials produce clean L2M report in final game of season

As the basketball world fetes LeBron James and the NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, and eulogizes the Golden State Warriors' would-be perfect season, don't expect many to spare a thought for the league's much-maligned officials.

The NBA's last-two-minute reports - instituted in the name of transparency at the start of this season - were a hot mess in the playoffs, revealing countless incorrect calls and non-calls at the end of nearly every game close enough to warrant such a report.

One game was revealed to have featured five blown calls in the final 14 seconds of regulation. It got to the point that the referees' union protested the reports, and called for the league to abolish them.

In the end, James wasn't the only person vindicated in Sunday night's epic Game 7 at Oracle Arena.

In its last-two-minute report of the season, the NBA found that the officiating crew of Danny Crawford, Mike Callahan, and Monty McCutchen faced 18 situations in the final two minutes in which an infraction either was committed, or could reasonably be believed to have been committed by either team.

According to the report, the crew got all 18 calls and non-calls correct.

Going two minutes without blowing a call may not seem like an accomplishment worth celebrating, but basketball is a notoriously difficult sport to officiate.

Plays unfold in an instant, often in mid-air, or amidst a swarm of bodies, with tangled limbs of indeterminate origin. Being a referee in any sport means being expected to get every call right, and getting mercilessly derided or accused of being a pawn in some grand conspiracy when you get one wrong.

It's a thankless job.

In the biggest two minutes of the season, Crawford, Callahan, and McCutchen deserve credit for calling it clean.