The whole reffing issue is a bit of just a bs excuse. Sure, we can point to some bad/missed calls, but that's par for the course. 1) Blazers are not one of the NBA's favorite teams so there will always be a bit of a disparity of calls. 2) The bad calls happen to all teams, it's a bit of a confirmation bias to only recognize the bad calls one direction. 3) Blazers don't play in a way to draw a ton of fouls, making it less likely the refs will give the Blazers the benefit of the call. 4) any disparity that does exist will continue into the playoffs, so Blazers better play through and better than ref-assisted teams.
I agree with what you're saying here for the most part, and I think the league has done a better job of cleaning up the star call/big market officiating bias since the Tim Donahue scandal. Most the bad calls even out in the end. Usually the refs will give a team a make-up call if they knew they screwed up (it happened to Dame the other night).
That said, in the case of the Golden State game earlier this year, that game was stolen from us. With a few seconds left we had the lead and the ball was knocked out of bounds. The call on the floor was Blazer ball. They reviewed it for about 10 minutes and none of the angles showed "conclusive" evidence that it went off the Blazers, yet they still overturned the call on the court and gave it to Golden State. Thompson hits a three for the lead, we fumbled the last possession, game over. Yeah you could say we still had a shot but it shouldn't have come to that. We were robbed by the refs flat out. It still baffles me why they overturned the call on the court. We should be 16-3 right now and leading the west.
