The Sixers beat the Lakers by a point on the road on Sunday night. It came down to the final possession:

Hmm, alright, well even when Westbrook gets free and clear of Embiid, he doinks the ball off the front of the rim. Seems like he felt the contact and decided to just go up with the ball in an effort to get the whistle, which didn’t come.

The entire sequence was gross for the Lakers. Embiid missed a shot with 16 seconds on the clock, and Westbrook grabbed the rebound with 13 remaining. Westbrook iso’d against Embiid, nearly turned the ball over with a bad dribble, then drove anyway. LeBron didn’t touch the ball and Darvin Ham stood there and decided not to call timeout. If that was a Sixers possession, fans would be apoplectic.

In the interest of throwing Westbrook a bone, we do watch Embiid and James Harden go to the foul line for that kind of contact seemingly 100 times a game. They drive, feel a hand down low, and then rip through en route to the stripe, but in this case the refs just decided to swallow their whistles. Maybe Russ has a point, but the Lakers deserved absolutely nothing for the way they handled this atrocity of a  possession: