Cartman718 wrote:I'll say it again...Refs love ****ing the Knicks. God forbid if they ever made a call that was questionable in our favor

Refs will generally shade for the home team and, in general, when it's not an elite matchup, will try to keep the game close. They also have to massage the length of the game to fit the time slot set up by the networks. Networks need a degree of certainty with time elements to properly sell ad time to corporations/brands for commercials.

Knicks also have a lot of young players and journeymen, and those guys never get any calls.

This was the open conflict with Melo. As an All Star and Olympian and a marketable player, he rated tons of free contact where the refs would look the other way. No home game at MSG would sit well with fans paying courtside seat prices to watch Melo foul out at the start of the 4th quarter. He had a massive advantage to basically maul any non elite player he wanted, but never cared enough to do it. Meaning even an average defender/defensive effort would scale up accordingly just from the free contact that "superstar" players rate. He could have made a big impact defensively just by getting to league average. Of course, he didn't give a ****.

Zinger will be able to bang at will when he comes back, but I doubt he'll do that or take advantage of that.