Did the refs have money riding on the Cavs-Timberwolves game?

No.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that neither Scott Foster, Natalie Sago nor Danielle Scott had money riding on Friday night’s Cavs-Timberwolves game at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

You can say what you want about the quality of the officiating in this game – it seems like a lot of folks on both sides had some issues with it. Rudy Gobert certainly did.

Gobert didn’t like when the refs whistled him for landing an elbow on Jarrett Allen’s face as they jockeyed for position in the low post. And he #letemknow by doing a cute impression of Johnny Manziel on draft day, suggesting that there was a connection between legalized sports gambling and the referees making the correct call with 27.8 seconds left in regulation. (I know, Rudy, it’s always a flop.)

To be fair, sports betting has been legal in the Buckeye State since Jan. 1, 2023, thanks to the passage of House Bill 29. In fact, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling in 2018, some 38 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting in some form, according to Forbes.

And for all you conspiracy theorists out there, according to the National Basketball Referees Association, Sago’s favorite TV show is “I (Almost) Got Away With It.” That’s an admission of guilt if there ever was one. (Her favorite movie: “Home Alone.”)

And we all know about Tim Donaghy. Maybe Gobert just finished watching the Netflix special (“Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul”). Or maybe Gobert knows something we don’t know.

Here’s what we do know: Gobert and the Timberwolves were playing the second night of a back-to-back, without one of their stars. The T-Wolves were spent, and Jarrett Allen was getting under his skin. We also know that Gobert is a blowhard who believes every foul call on him is an egregious flop.

After the game, Gobert doubled-down on his assertion that sports betting is “hurting our game,” according to a CBS Sports article. However, he’s not as big of an idiot as I thought, as he admitted “it wasn’t the time for me to react that way.”

“I should have not done that,” Gobert told reporters. “I cost my team the game, and obviously, they couldn’t wait to give me a tech. That was bad. That was an immature reaction.”

Case closed.