Heat, Hawks will do it over

The Miami Heat and Atlanta Hawks must replay the final 51.9 seconds of their game because an official scorer incorrectly ruled that Heat center Shaquille O’Neal fouled out, the NBA announced Friday.

The Heat lost the Dec. 19 game in overtime, 117-111, and protested afterward, saying Hawks scoring personnel inaccurately marked down O’Neal’s fifth personal foul as his sixth.

The teams will replay the last 51.9 seconds of overtime immediately before they meet again March 8 at Atlanta. The Hawks led at the time, 114-111.

The error occurred because the official scorer mistakenly marked a foul against O’Neal with 3:24 to play in the fourth quarter. The foul was actually on Miami forward Udonis Haslem.

NBA Commissioner David Stern fined the Hawks $50,000 for the error.

“We’re human. We make mistakes,” Hawks owner Michael Gearon said. “There certainly wasn’t anything malicious about it. We have one of the most senior scoring staffs in the league.”

The protest is the first to be granted by the NBA since December 1982, when former NBA Commissioner Larry O’Brien upheld a protest by San Antonio after its 137-132 double-overtime loss to the Lakers in November that year.

In that game, the Spurs led by two points with three seconds to play when Lakers guard Norm Nixon illegally faked the second of two free-throw attempts to send players from both teams falling into the lane.

The referees called a double lane violation and signaled for a jump ball. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tipped the ball to Magic Johnson, who passed it to Nixon, who hit the game-tying shot at the buzzer. The Lakers won in the second overtime, 137-132.

Or maybe not.

The Spurs successfully filed a protest, and the teams were told to replay the final three seconds of the game immediately before their scheduled game in April 1983. San Antonio ended up winning, 117-114, but only after Kurt Rambis barely missed a 90-foot heave.

“It was one of those things where it looked good on the way, but as it got closer, you saw it wasn’t going in,” said Rambis, now an assistant coach with the Lakers.

Nixon, a basketball analyst for Fox Sports West, chuckles about the whole thing now.

“We wound up winning the championship, so it didn’t matter,” he said, smiling. “We saw those same [San Antonio] guys in the Western Conference finals.”

The Lakers beat the Spurs in six games in the West finals.

The common thread from that protested 1982 game and the Heat-Hawks game last month: Pat Riley was coaching in each of them.

Riley, in the third season of his second stint as the Heat coach, said he would rest better Friday night.

“I can wake up tomorrow knowing there’s one less loss,” he said.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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