Here’s a story Microsoft likely won’t be using in its next ad campaign: the result of a relegation game in ProA — Germany’s 2nd level pro basketball league — between BV Chemnitz 99 and Paderborn. As is standard in European sports leagues, the loser of a relegation match drops to the next-lowest level of competition — in this case, ProB (Bundesliga is the highest level of German basketball). Tip-off for the loser-leaves-town game was scheduled for 7:30 pm at Paderborn’s arena, but the scoreboard went out between warmups and the official start.
What transpired next is something that would definitely only happen in a second-rate foreign pro basketball league. We’ll let Redditor zombiejh explain it English (if you can either 1. read German, or 2. enjoy very broken English via Google Translate, go here for the official story):
A few days ago in the second tier Paderborn played Chemnitz. This was the second last matchday and both teams needed a win to not get relegated. Match was supposed to start at 7.30PM … but the laptop that controls/displays the time, score and the 24 second clock needed an Windows Update right when the game was supposed to start (it worked during the warmup).
The officials decided to do the update because they thought it would be over in 2-3 minutes … but it took longer. After over 10 minutes they decided to use a manual scoreboard. But when they had build it up the laptop was ready and they used that instead.
Now, the match started and Paderborn won 69-62 which meant Paderborn gets to stay in the league and Chemnitz would be relegated into the third tier.
Whew, glad that all got worked out! Not so fast. The sore-ass losers on Chemnitz cried foul over the evening’s proceedings:
But Chemnitz protested afterwards because when a game is not started 15 minutes after sheduled time (which in this case it didn’t, it started 25 minutes late) the away team can protest and the league has to investigate. For this match they ruled that the hometeam (Paderborn) did not act fast enough to get replacement scoreboards.
Paderborn got withdrawn the points they won (for every win you get two points in the table) and is now getting relegated instead of Chemnitz altough they won the match.
What wasn’t mentioned on Reddit is that not only did Paderborn lose the two points for the win, but they were also docked one more point as punishment for not starting the game within the 15-minute window. As such, Chemnitz finished with 22 points on the season, while Paderborn dropped to 17 and a free trip to ProB.
[Reddit]
