Rick Carlisle’s referee, small-market groans are hilariously moronic

INDIANAPOLIS — The performance Rick Carlisle treated us to late Wednesday wasn’t exactly an original script, OK? After hugging the high road two nights earlier at Madison Square Garden, when he was clearly annoyed by a few late calls that went against his Pacers, Carlisle shrugged and said, “We’re not expecting to get calls in here.” 

Then on Wednesday he drove his car off the high road and Thelma-and-Louised it off a cliff. He got a technical late, then another, earning an ejection, and he was escorted off the Garden floor by Ray Charles serenading him: “Hit the Road, Jack.” Later he went in on the officiating with both barrels, the highlight of which was this gem: 

“Small-market teams deserve an equal shot. They deserve a fair shot no matter where they’re playing.”

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Attacking refs isn’t a new idea in basketball and it certainly isn’t a new idea in Indiana. For the better part of 30 years, an hour south of here down State Road 37 in Bloomington, they used to offer graduate-level coursework at the state university on the various disciplines of these dark arts. 

When the chairman of the department was named Bobby Knight, there was no telling how these lessons might be taught. Once he slammed his fist on a table so hard a press telephone flew off its receiver. Once he removed his basketball team from an exhibition game with the Russians, he was so irate by the whistle. Once, most famously, he chucked a chair across the floor at Assembly Hall. 

Later, when Prof. Knight started to go by the more adult (and presumably more dignified) “Bob,” he mostly just specialized in screaming at the refs, and berating them, one time almost head-butting Ted Valentine before veering off at the last second. To sit behind the Hoosiers bench during an NCAA Tournament game was to be treated to all seven of George Carlin’s dirty words before the first TV timeout. With a few extras tossed in. 

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Did all of that insufferability actually help Knight at all? Did Kent Benson or Mike Woodson or Damon Bailey or Calbert Cheaney ever get a key call, late, against Purdue or Illinois or Ohio State? Probably. 

So was Carlisle’s weird rant just a way to stack the odds that sometime Friday night — when the Knicks and Pacers play Game 3 of this Eastern Conference semifinal at what promises to be a jacked-up Gainbridge Fieldhouse — and it’s say, tied at 110 late, that Tyrese Haliburton or Pascal Siakam will get the benefit of the doubt on a whistle? 

Well … let’s hope that’s what the plan was. 

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Because while you can’t properly justify any of Knight’s antics across the years, at least they were funny, even if the humor was just watching a bombastic bully implode from a safe distance away from the detonation. Carlisle whining about small markets? 

Question: How are the two Los Angeles teams doing in the playoffs? 

How about Chicago? Has anyone heard from Brooklyn lately? 

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Oh: and two of the NBA’s hottest teams reside in Oklahoma City (pop: 694,000), which was 5-0 in the playoffs heading into Thursday night, and Minneapolis, a terrific city that will never be confused with Paris or London as a cosmopolitan capital, which is 6-0. 

Carlisle mentioned 29 instances in Game 1 when the Pacers could’ve filed a complaint to the league. Somehow in Game 2 he found 49 more (in a 48-minute game) and this time the Pacers officially did send every one to the league office. This is hilarious on two levels: 

1. There is now a 1,000 percent chance Tom Thibodeau is going to spend an extra hour or two with the Game 2 tape, just so he can find 50 instances of calls he believe went against the Knicks. 

2. Speaking of game tape … maybe Carlisle should spend more time with it figuring why he’s getting hammered by the men in Knicks uniforms, rather than seeking ways he’s being hosed by the men in the officials’ uniforms. 

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See, one thing Carlisle hasn’t mentioned is just how grotesquely outcoached he has been in the series. His flimsy full-court press has been a comical disaster. His team allowed 130 points to a depleted Knicks team that lost two of its remaining players for a quarter and a half. And his two best players the first two games were T.J. McConnell and Obi Toppin, neither of whom was anywhere near the court in crunch time either game. 

(Which reminds: it was Rick Carlisle who kept Jalen Brunson strapped to the bench his final year coaching Dallas, which probably helped stoke a few embers of resentment that ultimately nudged Brunson east. For that, he may qualify for the Knicks Hall of Fame). 

Actually, what’s funniest of all is Carlisle latching onto the stupidest narrative in sports: that the NBA kowtows to the Knicks. This has been a favored belief since the Knicks won the Patrick Ewing lottery in 1985. It’s a fun conspiracy theory. 

And between the dearth of championship banners and the fact that the Knicks have been in 18 lotteries since and have never, not once, moved up even one spot in the draft in any of them? The only way to come up with a worse conspiracy is if Jack Tripper had masterminded the Lufthansa Heist. 

Although at least that would’ve been funny.