Joakim Noah’s expletive-laced tirade towards the officials as he was ejected in the third quarter of Monday night’s blowout loss to the Sacramento Kings seemed to set the Internet on fire. After being assessed his second technical late in the quarter, Noah made sure to get his money’s worth as he had choice words for each referee before he left the floor.
After the game, Noah – who will most likely be fined heavily by the league – apologized for his actions.
“I’m really disappointed. I shouldn’t have acted that way,” Noah said. “I apologize, I’m sorry to all three referees out there. They’re out there trying to do their jobs and I should never have said the things that I said. I hope they accept my apology and I hope I can move on from this.”
The Bulls were outplayed by the Kings from the opening tip and couldn’t get any shots to fall and seemed to be on the wrong side of the referees whistles as far as Chicago was concerned.
“I’m not a referee. I know they’ve got a tough job. But it really seemed one-sided to me,” Carlos Boozer said. “For Joakim to lose his mind like that — you know how he is. He plays hard. Sometimes he gets fouls, most times he doesn’t because everybody respects how hard he plays. It was just really lop-sided tonight. It seemed like they shot a lot of free throws. In the first half, we shot a lot of free throws, but the second half, we didn’t shoot too many.”
However, there wasn’t a huge disparity in the foul shooting between the two halves. In the first two quarters, the Bulls shot 19 free throw attempts to the Kings11, and in the second half of the game, Sacramento shot 18 free throws to the Bulls 15.
Ultimately, it was just a frustrating night of basketball for Chicago.
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“I think I was just frustrated with the game,” Noah said. “You gotta give Sacramento a lot of credit. They played really well, they deserve to win and we’ve got to step it up, but I think I was just frustrated with the way the game was going. I was frustrated with the call, but it doesn’t give me the right to do what I did. I deserve to get ejected, and it was just a bad decision on my part.”
