Ginebra was sabotage by the referee! Right?

 Barangay Ginebra San Miguel was leading in the dying seconds of their game 2 battle against the Magnolia Hotshots.

If they won that game, they could have a 2-0 lead. In a five game series, that will be really hard to overcome. Specially with the reality that Ginebra clearly has the advantage in terms of talent.

What transpired though was a controversial inbound where a lot of fans claimed that Calvin Abueva should have been called a five-second violation.

It was not called and the ensuing play ended up with a dagger by Paul Lee. Paul who is having a renaissance of a playoffs. 

Looking at this video, it is easy to conclude that the referee was wrong.

But then the PBA just provided an answer, stating that the PBA referee was correct in not calling a five-second violation.

And I think this video is the right explanation. 

It was really a close call. But it clearly shows that the referee did his job. It was meant to be a manual count. And it shows that the referee was delayed by around half a second in starting his count, but other than that there is nothing unusual with the way he counted.

You can also see that at the last moment before the ball found Paul Lee, the referee was on the process of making the final sign of ending his count which should have resulted to the violation.

The league though can learn from this and actually have someone in their technical booth do a systematic counting and gave them the ability to call the violation if the referee missed it.