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ESPN Called Last Night’s Heat-Celtics Game A Tad Early

Despite doing a good job and giving good effort, the Miami Heat lost to the Boston Celtics 94-90 last night, moving them to the brink of elimination. You know this. We know this. The people behind the NBA on ESPN’s Facebook page certainly know this. Unfortunately for the latter group, though, according to multiple screengrabs, the NBA on ESPN’s Facebook page (briefly) posted something that made it appear they did not know this:

That image, as you might expect, does not currently appear on The NBA on ESPN’s Facebook page – rather, a big fat Celtics version of that same graphic greets you at the top of their timeline. And as usual with things like this, there were some cries of “FAKE!!!!!111!!!!!1!!111!!” in the discussion for the graphic. As best we can tell, though, it’s real: again, it wasn’t just one person pointing this out, so if it was fake, there’s a large, multi-person anti-”The NBA on ESPN’s Facebook page” conspiracy afoot. Still, to make totally sure, we contacted ESPN, and will update if and when we hear back.

UPDATE: We heard back. As expected, yes, the above was real. ESPN rep Josh Krulewitz included this brief statement:

“It was removed quickly after we mistakenly uploaded it for a brief moment.”

Ah, but the Internet seizes upon even the briefest of moments.

The rest of the original post is below.

But operating under the idea that it is indeed real: we feel bad for whoever posted it. We imagine ESPN had one ready for each team, and the wrong one accidentally got posted prematurely. Happens to the best of us. But we’ll be damned if it’s not funny. Hey, at least it disappeared almost as quickly as it went up. Quick recovery: good effort.