EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- If Friday night's double-overtime loss to the Nets ends up being the defeat that keeps the Chicago Bulls out of the playoffs, there will be three controversial calls that went New Jersey's way that should keep Bulls fans angry all the way through April and well into May.

New Jersey's 127-118 victory actually gave the NBA's worst team a season series (2-1) victory over Chicago, but the Bulls were steamed afterward that the game even went to one extra period.

In their opinion, there were three erroneous calls, a couple of them egregiously erroneous, that went against them and ultimately killed them:

• At the end of regulation, Brook Lopez slammed home a miss by Courtney Lee with 0.1 seconds remaining to tie the game 103-103. The Bulls immediately protested that Lopez had committed offensive basket interference, and camera angles (there was no camera above the backboard, which would have given the best view) were inconclusive as to whether the ball would have touched the rim again before Lopez slammed it in. "They said he caught it off the rim, I wanted them to review it and they said 'No, it was a clean play.' And that was it," Bulls coach Vinny Del Negro said. "They said there was no doubt in their minds it was off the cylinder."
• The Bulls quickly went ahead by seven points in the first overtime, but the Nets stormed back and were within two points when Derrick Rose drove the lane and Courtney Lee reached in and grabbed Rose's left arm. But no foul was called, Rose lost the ball out of bounds off his knee with 25.2 seconds left, and Lopez tied the game on a pair of foul shots with 12.8 seconds remaining before Rose missed an 18-foot fadeaway at the buzzer to send the game to a second overtime. "They're the referees. If it was up to me, they had to see the foul. But it wasn't a foul, they called it out of bounds and that was that," Rose said. "I definitely did [feel contact], but it's not my decision to make that call. It's up to the refs."
• Rose, who missed four of his eight free throw attempts in the fourth quarter, was assessed a flagrant foul with 9:28 left in the fourth quarter for raising his elbow while trying to fight through a pick set by Kris Humphries. "I didn't really get a good explanation, but it looked like Derrick was just trying to fight over a screen," Del Negro said. The Nets turned it into a four-point possession to go ahead by nine, eventually getting their lead up to 11 before Chicago came back from a 10-point deficit in the final 4 1/2 minutes of regulation.

The Bulls now head to Toronto for the biggest game of their season, needing a victory to surpass the Raptors, who lost 107-101 to Atlanta on Friday, in the Eastern Conference standings.

Both Toronto and Chicago are 38-41, but Toronto owns the tiebreaker by having already clinched the season series (the teams meet only three times this season, and Toronto is 2-0 thus far), so the Bulls need to finish with a better record to earn the right to play the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round.

Chicago finishes the season with a back-to-back set at home against Boston on Tuesday and on the road against Charlotte on Wednesday, while Toronto has it easier, playing at Detroit on Monday before finishing at home Wednesday against New York.

Which pretty much makes Sunday's game the first of three straight must-win games for Chicago.

"We had the game in hand in the first overtime, and it shouldn't have even gone to a second overtime. But you can't hang your heads, nobody's going to feel sorry for you," Del Negro said. "You usually get what you deserve. We turned it over [17 times] and didn't make free throws [19-for-29, with eight of the misses coming in the second half], and if we had handled that a little bit better it would have been a different story."