The unanimous MVP Stephen Curry was ejected from Game 6 of the Finals, prompting his wife Ayesha to publish and later delete a tweet claiming that the NBA is rigged.
Do the referees really have it out for Curry and the Warriors? And what should we expect in Game 7?
Let's take a close look at how the whistles have gone, FAQ style.
Are the Cavaliers getting more calls than the Warriors?
First off, this series is so even that it's the first time in playoffs history that we're heading into a Game 7 with both teams tied in points (610), according to Micah Adams of ESPN Stats and Info.
And just as you might suspect, the free throw battle is pretty even too.
This series, the Cavs have 142 free throws compared to 132 for the Warriors. That's a gap way too small to throw a red flag on the officials, and we'd expect the Cavs to have the edge there, given that they were ranked 23rd in free throw rate in the regular season with the Warriors ranked 25th.
The Warriors aren't a team that lives at the free throw line. And they haven't needed free throws to win anyway.
For instance, in the first two games of the series, the Warriors trounced the Cavs by 48 points despite losing the free throw battle. The free throws were basically inconsequential.
What about calls in high-leverage clutch situations?
If the calls are even overall, maybe the particular calls have fallen on one side at critical times. But the funny thing about that is we haven't seen a clutch minute in this entire series!
Clutch minutes, as defined by the NBA, happen when a game is within five points in the final five minutes. And there have been zero such minutes.
As an aside, that's the first time we've seen that in the 20 years of data the league provides (the NBA's StatsCube database dates to 1997). As a counterexample, there were five close-and-late games in the 2015 Finals alone.
So for all the talk about officiating, there have been essentially no opportunities for the whistles to tilt the game in the closing minutes.
A related point: Because of the lack of close games, we don't have access to the last two minutes reports that the league sends out about referee performances. The games have not met the requirement that the score has to be within five points in the final two minutes.
Has Stephen Curry seen fewer calls?
Curry doesn't use the charity stripe heavily, and his free throws have been more or less on par with his seasonal rate. Curry averaged 5.3 free throws per 36 minutes in the regular season, and in this series, the number is 4.7.
On the other end, Curry has been whistled for 21 fouls in this series after tallying just 10 in a seven-game series against Oklahoma City. His series rate (3.6 fouls per 36 minutes) is substantially higher than his regular-season rate (2.1), but he has never had more than four fouls in a game until Game 6, when he fouled out -- on calls that Steve Kerr and others found questionable -- before being ejected.
What about home-court advantage? Are referees favoring the home team more?
This is where we see abnormality this year.
Home teams typically earn more free throws than the away team. Since 1997, the home team in the Finals has totaled 16.6 more free throw attempts on average than the visiting team.
There could be many reasons for this, apart from any bias. For example, the home team is generally leading, and often the road team needs to foul to "extend" the game, get the ball back and try to rally.
But this Finals? The home/away margin has swung completely in the other direction. The road team has taken 32 more free throws this series than the home team, overall. That's by far the largest deficit for the home team since 1997.
Has the road team gotten more whistles in more recent games?
Actually, no. In fact, after a large swell in the first two games, the home-road splits have basically evened out after Game 3. In Game 1, the Cavs earned 10 more free throw attempts than the home Warriors and then 14 more in Game 2. And yet the Warriors won both games by big margins, and then in Game 3, lost the game while shooting nine more free throws.
The Warriors toed the charity stripe five more times than the Cavs in Game 4 at Quicken Loans Arena. In Games 5 and 6, the road team took three fewer freebies in each contest, reversing the trend. That's despite intentional fouling by Golden State in Game 5 at home.
Why do road team free throws matter?
In January of 2015, we reported that home-court advantage in point differential had declined to historically low levels. Home teams just weren't winning like they used to. In that story, league executives theorized that increased 3-point shooting, sports science and homer-resistant referees were factors.
Shortly after that story published, home teams had their best month on record, and things have seemed a bit more like the historical norms. And in this postseason, the home team has had its most successful postseason since 1997, winning each game by 8.2 points per game.
So we have more road free throws than usual in the Finals, but bigger home blowouts than usual.
What does this mean for Game 7?
The good news for the Warriors is that the home team tends to see more free throw attempts in Finals Game 7s. In the 11 Game 7s in the Finals in NBA history, the home team has taken 336 free throw attempts compared to 310 for the road team, or about 2.4 more on average.
Of course, there are exceptions. The most recent example was the 2013 NBA Finals, when the Spurs won the free throw battle (22 attempts to 16) but the Heat won the game on their home floor.
With the season on the line, we should expect a fairly physical game.
But contrary to conventional wisdom, the refs don't tend to swallow the whistle in Game 7s. In fact, we have seen a slight uptick in free throws in Finals Game 7s (29.6) compared to Finals Game 6s (28.2). Furthermore, foul-out disqualifications occurred to 4.2 percent of players in Finals Game 6s, but that jumps to 5.3 percent in Finals Game 7s.
Whether that means referees call the game a little more tightly or that the players are more grabby in Game 7s, we don't know. We do know one thing: It's time to buckle in.
And with any luck, we can focus on the players, not the refs.