here's a little snippet from Tim Donaghy after game 7...
"The big thing that stands out about the series is how dramatically the officiating changed after the first two games. In Games 1 and 2, the referees handed out fouls like candy — 54 were called in the opener, 58 in the next game. Over the remainder of the series, refs called an average of 44 fouls. What happened? Well, I can say from experience that it had nothing to do with the play on the floor and a lot more to do with what happened in a hotel room the morning of every game.
Here's how it works: In the playoffs, three refs and an alternate meet in a hotel room with a group supervisor before a game. The league office e-mails the supervisor a list of things it wants the officials to concentrate on, and the supervisor relays the message to the refs in their meeting. When I was in the league, the memos — hot off the desks of the likes of Stu Jackson, Ed T. Rush, or Ronnie Nunn — would usually detail what kinds of fouls needed to be better addressed. The message would be something like,
Team X is getting away with an enormous amount of handchecking, or
Shawn Bradley is hanging out under the basket, not really defending anybody. He's committing a defensive three-second violation. The goal was to set the tone for that night's game and, even more broadly, for the series. An extreme example: the 2005 Dallas-Houston matchup. I was the alternate for Game 3 and sat in on the meeting with the group supervisor. We were told explicitly to start calling moving screens and traveling violations on Yao Ming. (Jeff Van Gundy
would later complain publicly that referees were targeting Yao; he got fined for it.) Houston was up 2-0 at that point. Dallas wound up winning in seven games."