A timeout had Knicks fans furious because they believed the team didn’t use one in the closing seconds of the game.
The only problem was that there was never any timeout left for Knicks coach Mike Brown to use, despite the NBC broadcast incorrectly saying they still had one left at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
The Knicks lost Game 2 107-106 to the Hawks, with the series now tied at one game apiece.
The confusing piece of information changed the way supporters looked at the final play of the game after Josh Hart grabbed the rebound off a missed Hawks free throw and quickly moved the ball up the court to Mikal Bridges, who missed a potential game-winning shot at the buzzer.
The NBC broadcast team said the Knicks still had one timeout left and the scorebug showed one remaining. The phantom timeout was mistakenly added to the scorebug with 5.6 seconds left after C.J. McCollum’s first missed free throw.
What appeared to come into play was the fact that the NBA limits teams to two timeouts with less than three minutes to go.
Brown oddly called one with 2:43 left on the clock with Jalen Brunson already driving into the lane and then used a second one with 10 seconds left in the game.
“A couple of possessions weren’t fluid,” Brown said postgame of the timeout at 2:43. “So I wanted to make sure that we had something we wanted to get to, or to set something up offensively. because we had whiffed on the last couple possessions. It just didn’t look right, it didn’t feel right.”
The whole situation led to people jumping on social media to express their confusion after figuring out that the timeout didn’t actually exist.
“I deleted my tweet about the Knicks not taking a timeout because… evidently they didn’t have one???” Fox Sports’ Nick Wright wrote on X. “The broadcast said they did, and the score bug (after initially saying they didn’t have one) said they did, but it appears that was all incorrect. That makes a lot more sense.”
“I didn’t love not taking the timeout there as the broadcast said they had one, but turns out they didn’t, so makes sense why they didn’t. Holy confusing,” sports talk host Zach Gelb wrote on X.
Brown told reporters after the game that it would have been a “gut feel” if he would have used a timeout on that final possession, if he had one.
“I thought it was a good shot. I don’t think the shot was under a ton of duress,” he said.
