The Bulls, led by first-year head coach Phil Jackson, later filed an official protest with the NBA about the play.
However, timekeeper Bob Billings and referee Ronnie Nunn, who were working that game, claimed everything went perfectly fine.
Thorn argued that it was physically impossible for a player to receive an inbounds pass and release it for a shot in less than a tenth of a second.
At the start of the 1989–90 season, the NBA had adopted a rule from FIBA making game clocks register tenths of seconds in the final minute of a period.
During the first weeks of the season, it was evident the manufacturer's scoreboards would have frequent calibration flaws with tenths in the final minute.
[citation needed] Further changes in 1991 were designed to eliminate the problem with the AS&I units with a new directive for 1991–92 to add shot clocks with duplicate game time.
At that point, most venues purchased new scoreboards from White Way Sign, Fair-Play, or Daktronics, because of the calibration consistency of the new units.
On December 20, 2006, New York Knicks forward David Lee scored a game-winning basket with only 0.1 left on the clock.
The shot counted because Lee deflected in the inbounds pass into the basket (just like what was foreseen by the Knicks and Bulls in their game years before).
[2] Another example of this rule being invoked occurred at the end of a game between the University of South Florida and Florida Gulf Coast University on December 17, 2013, when FGCU appeared to tie the game at 68 on a Chase Fieler shot off a full-court inbounds pass with 0.3 seconds remaining in double overtime.