With 4.1 seconds left in a tied game, the Lakers drew up a play to get LeBron James the ball. He drove hard to the basket and Jayson Tatum clearly caught his arm on the shot, but the refs didn’t blow the whistle. LeBron missed the layup and immediately lost it. He slapped the floor, punched the air, staggered, yelled, and looked completely defeated. Then came the support. In the span of about a minute, LeBron got consoled or touched 33 times by his teammates and coaches, everything from back pats to a neck squeeze. He tried to regroup, but the drama kept going.
As the argument over the missed foul continued, Patrick Beverley took things further. He grabbed a camera from a courtside photographer and marched it over to the ref to show the foul. The ref responded with a technical. The photographer he borrowed the camera from didn’t look thrilled either. The Celtics may have walked away with the win, but the no-call at the end left a lot of frustration on the Lakers’ side and stirred plenty of reactions. LeBron didn’t get the whistle, but he did get an overwhelming amount of sympathy from his squad.