Yeah, I was shocked he thought that was the worst call of the night. It looks like Scott is probably selling it, so as an Illini fan, I'd like to think it was a complete flop, but I can't fault the official for calling it.
For the sake of putting them all in one post, I saw three obviously bad calls in OT:
No call on Mirk's drive @4:28. As an 80% free throw shooter, that cost us ~1.6 points.
Phantom call on Tomi @2:24. He jumped straight up and while his arm came down slightly, the contact was near his armpit within his vertical space. Nowhere close to this marginal of contact was called the other way (including Kohler holding on this play). It looked like MSU would have gotten the rebound, so this call gave them 2 points instead of ~1.2, so an extra ~0.8 points.
No call on Z's rebound attempt @2:04. This cost us ~1.3 points.
That's ~3.7pts, meaning MSU would theoretically have had the ball tied or maybe up 1 with 40sec left instead of up 4. The rest after that would play out differently than it did (MSU certainly wouldn't try to run out the shot clock if it was tied).
Aside from those obvious ones, I thought the foul on Mirk @4:14 was soft, didn't create that much of an advantage, and wasn't in line with the way the game was being called. He did step out late and give a push, though, and Kohler was about to be wide open for 3, so I'm not going to get upset about it. But Mirk probably should be more careful not to pick up his 4th foul for something like this.
The Jake Davis screen on Scott @3:00 could have gone all sorts of ways. It's bang-bang whether he had stopped leaning in, and maybe he pushed through initial contact. But if they call that, they have to consider Scott's hook and elbow to the head. A foul on Davis first makes it a dead-ball, so I think anything on Scott would have to be a flagrant or tech. I think it's reasonable that the ref's didn't want to have to get into that and let them play-on since no advantage was created. It would have fouled Scott out though, so MSU can still feel like they caught some kind of break here.
