Devin Booker has spent more than a decade keeping referee complaints generic. After Tuesday night's 120-107 Game 2 loss in Oklahoma City, he stopped.
"My 11 years, I haven't called a ref by name, but James was terrible tonight," Booker told reporters in his postgame availability. "Through and through. It's bad for the sport, bad for the integrity of the sport. People are going to start viewing this as a WWE if they're not held responsible."
The Suns guard added a note about why he, of all people, was the one saying it out loud.
"I haven't won a championship in this league," Booker said, "but I have been in it for 11 years now. So to get to this point to be treated like that, for me to even be saying something out loud, is bad."
The flashpoint was a third-quarter sequence in which Booker was hit with a technical foul on a play where, in real time, neither he nor anyone else on the floor seemed sure who the official was actually addressing. Booker tried to slap the ball away as it was going out of bounds and was whistled for an attack on the play. The Suns spent the rest of the night protesting through the broadcast feed.
Franchise governor Mat Ishbia did the unusual public thing and backed his star openly.
"Nobody who loves this game enjoyed watching that last night," Ishbia posted, in remarks read on ESPN's NBA Today.
ESPN front office insider Bobby Marks went to the tape and broke down what he saw, ultimately landing in a place that splits the difference. Marks expects the league office to discipline Booker for the public broadside, while also conceding that the technical itself was probably wrong.
"Two things are going to happen here, likely things," Marks said on NBA Today. "Devin Booker is going to get fined, and the tech should be rescinded, I think, for that. I agree on that."
Marks said the foul disparity itself was actually closer than the Suns' postgame mood suggested.
"25 fouls for Phoenix, 21 fouls for Oklahoma City. Not big of a differential. If there is a player that has gripe, it's probably Collin Gillespie, who was whistled for four fouls, and I think two of them were questionable here."
Where Marks would not give Phoenix the moral high ground was on the wider question of why Oklahoma City lives at the line. The Thunder, he argued, are simply better than anyone else at making contact look like a foul.
"Oklahoma City is a difficult team to play. Besides being extremely talented, I think the word probably is annoying, as far as how they draw the contact," Marks said. "If you put your arm out, I'm going to put my arm out, and that's going to be a foul, because they know how to bait you into calls there. A lot of it's not just Oklahoma City. We're going to watch Jalen Brunson do it tonight probably in New York. They know how to draw fouls and they're the best at it."
Marks isolated the Booker tech as part of a back-to-back sequence with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and pointed at hand position as the deciding factor.
"Devin Booker goes up. Alex Caruso leans in. You see Alex Caruso lean in, but look at where his hands are. They're down. And I think that's a really big difference between the next play where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has the ball and his hands are up," Marks said. "When your hand is up and you know how to draw that contact and you know how to exaggerate that contact, you're oftentimes going to get that call."
The Suns travel home for Game 3 on Friday down 0-2 to the defending champions, having absorbed a 13-point loss, the loss of star wing Jalen Williams to a hamstring injury (for Oklahoma City, not Phoenix), and the public-relations cost of their best player calling out the league. Whether Booker is sitting on a fine or simply absorbed one in advance, his message was already out before the league office opened the next morning.
