TORONTO — Things took a bizarre turn halfway through the third quarter of the Nets’ 94-87 victory over the Raptors in Game 1 of their best-of-7 first round playoff series Saturday afternoon when both shot clocks stopped working.
After a delay of several minutes while attempts were made to fix the clock, the game continued without them working, and with Raptors public address announcer Herbie Kuhn having to call out every time the clock reset to 24 seconds, as well as when it hit 10 seconds and then counting down from five down to it expiring on every possession for the remainder of the game.
“We experienced a signal path failure midway through the third quarter of today’s game,” Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Raptors and Air Canada Centre, said in the statement. “Our backup system for the temporary shot clocks relied on the same source.”
“New cables will be run tonight and tomorrow to ensure no issues arise on Tuesday, and the NBA will inspect both the fixed and backup systems before Game 2.”
The malfunction both made for a comedic element to the rest of the game, as Kuhn’s voice would periodically boom through the arena, including when he would say “horn” when the buzzer was supposed to go off, as well as working to take some of the juice out of the sellout home crowd.
For the players, on the other hand, most of them just described it as a weird situation, and one most of them had really experienced before.
“That was weird,” Shaun Livingston said, smiling and shaking his head. “That was weird.”
“It was like your backyard, with somebody calling it out. But we got used to it.”
One player who was used to it, however, was Alan Anderson, who said that during his time spent playing in Europe having the clocks stop working was a regular occurrence.
“In Europe,” he said, “we had that a lot.”
“They had an announcer [call it out, too], but it would be in whatever language,” he added, laughing. “They would yell out something and I would go, ‘What does that mean?’”