MIAMI — Let's get the obvious out of the way: If you want to get technical (get it?), Paul Pierce has only Paul Pierce to blame for getting kicked out of Sunday's Game 1 loss to the Heat.

Look, Pierce is 33 years old. He has about 130,000 miles on his NBA tires. He's played almost 1,100 games in his career. So when James Jones commits a hard but not dirty foul, Pierce has to know better. He can't face-butt, or almost head-butt, or whatever it was he did to pick up that (absolutely deserved) first technical foul on Sunday. You'd like to think — in the autumn of his NBA career — Pierce is composed enough to resist the desire to do what he did. I was disappointed. I thought Pierce had completely buried the guy who melted down on the court in Indiana during the 2005 playoffs. 

So if you want to give Pierce the hit for being ejected, OK. I would agree with you, normally. But what happened a minute after the Pierce/Jones technical was so incredibly pathetic — even by NBA officiating standards — that I think we might need to move on from Pierce's dopiness and dig a little deeper.

We all saw it and we all still haven't seen it, right? Dwyane Wade -- who was, on Sunday, every bit the Dwyane Wade that we all saw in the first round last year and had us convinced he was a better player than LeBron James — ran into Pierce, who was attempting to set a screen for Ray Allen on the baseline. Wade was (correctly) whistled for a foul (Doc Rivers said after the game that he thought it was a flagrant, he's wrong on that one) and he and Pierce briefly exchanged words. 

Pierce was backing up — the situation nearly over, never within 5,000 miles of danger — when Ed Malloy nailed Pierce with another technical. 

Huh? What did we miss? It must have been pretty salty stuff to get Paul Pierce kicked out of a playoff game. Maybe not at the level of Kobe Bryant's tirade from a few weeks back (though Bryant wasn't ejected for his slur), but we have to be talking something that could be slapped with an NC-17 rating.

I mean, not a single possession goes by without a coach, player or (yup) referee dropping one of the bombs we know they always drop. And I don't know if you've been watching much NBA lately, but there isn't a technical foul called on every possession.

So, let's get to the bottom of this mystery. The NBA does a swell job of making the officials available to the media after the game to answer each and every question. And by "swell" I mean the NBA allows a single reporter to ask the crew chief — in this case Dan Crawford — what it is that exactly happened. 

"It's what we call a verbal taunt," Crawford said of the second technical. "He directed profanity towards Wade. And in the rulebook, that is a verbal taunt. And it just so happened to be Pierce's second technical foul."

Again, there is literally not a play in the NBA that doesn't involve what anyone would call a "verbal taunt." So, we have no idea what was said by Pierce. Watching the replay a couple of times doesn't give you an idea, either. Still at nowhere.

The two main characters in this drama were not heard from after the game. Pierce declined to speak, and Malloy isn't the crew chief, so he can't weigh in. 

And now we are getting somewhere. When a player screws up, he has to face the media (Pierce will address the issue on Monday). Same goes for a coach, GM, owner, etc. But referees? Nope. And that's a problem.

(Oh, and Pierce and Doc Rivers likely will each be fined for their actions Sunday. If, in fact, Ed Malloy was more than just guilty of a staggering overreaction and was in fact in the wrong for giving Pierce the second tech? His punishment will be … well, we don't really know. But I'd be stunned if he was benched in any fashion.)

Ed Malloy (a mediocre ref by the kindest standard) might hate Paul Pierce, maybe something born after an argument in Milwaukee in February. Could be he took pleasure in running Pierce. Or maybe he feels like he made an all-time mistake and is destroyed over it. My best guess? Probably he thinks he made the right call and never gave it a second thought.

But we don't know. Why? Because David Stern — the villain is revealed — thinks the best solution to any controversy involving referees is secrecy.

I don't know, does that seem the best direction for a league that gave us Tim Donaghy? Of course not. But Stern — as overrated a figure as any in sports history, were it not for Bird and Magic he'd be just another commissioner — isn't interested in full disclosure. Easier just to sweep it to the side and hope people forget about it by Game 2.

Which we most likely will. By Tuesday the story will be about the Celtics possibly playing for their season. But if there's a questionable call from any of the three refs working Game 2, there will be the always-present conspiracy crowd, working the fixed angle as it inevitably does. 

The NBA has done zilch to give those loons one second of pause. Thanks to silence, incompetence and recent history, it is literally impossible to have any confidence that an NBA officiating crew is going to do its job with an acceptable level of competence. We saw it again on Sunday (in a game the Celtics were going to lose anyway, just to be clear) and we will see it again this postseason, and probably in this series.

Officiating — not the Artest brawl, not the endless buffet of 74-68 games that we served in the late 1990s, not the death of NBA basketball in Seattle — is the black mark on David Stern's tenure as commish. And he's done nothing to fix it.

And Paul Pierce knows that as well as anyone. Which makes his actions even more inexcusable on Sunday (can something be more inexcusable?). The reality is some of these refs (Malloy at the front) are so lousy that you can't put yourself in the position Pierce did. 

A step backward for Paul Pierce? Without question.

Another dark day in officiating? No doubt about it. 

Maybe we should just give them both technical fouls and move on in silence.