A Sporting Chance: Will a Crooked Zebra Destroy the NBA?
There are many troubling aspects to the story of an NBA official who is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly betting on games in which he officiated and then made calls in order to fix the point spreads in those contests.
One of the major problems is, of course, that the actions of referee Tim Donaghy call into question the integrity of the game. Is he the only ref involved? Are there other crooked zebras who may have fallen in with gamblers and affected the outcome of games?
But even more troubling than this is the fact that hardly anyone was surprised. I know I wasn’t. To many sports fans, the question of whether NBA refs have been dirty in the past was never an issue. The question has always been how much of the horrid officiating in the NBA game was the result of incompetence and how much was due to the gamblers?
In defense of all officials in all sports – especially at the professional level – allow me to quote the great American League baseball umpire Nestor Chylack: “Umpires are expected to be perfect on opening day and improve as the season wears on.” It is well nigh an impossible job, I’ll admit. And at the professional level, the challenges (and the stakes) are enormous which puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the official to either make the correct call or swallow his whistle as the case may be.
Until a few years ago, I would have placed baseball umpires head and shoulders above all other professional sports officiating in terms of consistency and quality. Then, the umpires unionized and began to protect the incompetents in their midst and the quality of umpiring plummeted to where nowadays, the umps at home plate need a monitor in order to judge their accuracy in calling balls and strikes. (Poor Nester would be rolling in his grave if he or any of the old timers were challenged like that.)
Hockey refs are arguably as bad as NBA zebras but are hampered by the fact that much of the illegal action – hitting, grabbing, tripping – occurs behind them as they must follow the flow of play and the puck.
Even a game like the NFL with 7 officials on the field can’t get it right and oftentimes screws it up badly. The history of the league is replete with stories of officials who froze or missed the play badly. The “Immaculate Reception” by Franco Harris in the 1972 AFC title game is a good example. The referee, Fred Swearingen, actually called up to the booth and talked to Art McNally, NFL Supervisor of Officials before making his call that the catch was legal and the Steelers had won the game. McNally used a replay of the play to make his call – a highly unusual move given that instant replay did not come into the league until 1999. It was also said that Swearingen was terrified that if he ruled the pass incomplete that he would have been mobbed by the thousands of Steelers fans who had rushed the field following the touchdown believing the Steelers had won the game.
But what most of us fear about the Donaghy caper is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not just for the NBA but for all professional sports. And that fear is based on the startling fact that betting on sports is simply out of control.
Consider:
- 7 of 10 U.S. adults placed some sort of wager in the last year.
- According to the NCAA, 35% of male college students bet on sports.
- Online sports betting is estimated to be 5 times bigger than Las Vegas sports betting.
- Illegal sports betting (barroom bookies) is estimated to be 35 times bigger than Nevada.
- Over 20 gambling companies are listed on non-U.S. stock exchanges. The biggest sports betting company has a market value of almost $3 billion.
- The biggest sports books employee over 2,000 people during football
- The MGM-Mirage has publicly lobbied to allow U.S. companies to take part in online gambling.
(Figures from About.Com)
Even as the US Congress passed a law preventing banks and credit card companies from transferring money to and from customers who use internet gaming sites, the fact is it is impossible to enforce the law by arresting individual gamers. The feds have gone after a couple of high profile CEO’s of online gambling sites but have yet to make an effort to shut down the sites or arrest the players.
With billions of dollars up for grabs, it makes one seriously consider the possibility that there is a certain percentage of officials in all the games who are crooked. And that possibility chills the bones of many of us who love sports and know that revelations about dirty zebras would devastate the professional game.
ESPN’s Bill Simmons sums up the peril of the NBA:
“Guilty or innocent, we will never watch an NBA game the same way. He’s going to hang over everything-every referee, every shaky outcome, every bad call-in ways the average fan doesn’t fully realize yet. Maybe they’ll throw Donaghy in jail, maybe they won’t, but he’ll linger over every court like a black cloud. You’ll hear his name more than you think. You and your buddies will make “that guy looks like he’s pulling a Donaghy!” jokes every time a referee is making calls against your favorite team. Hecklers will gleefully play the Donaghy card after every bad call against the home team. For honest referees still working games, it doesn’t matter what happens from this point on-their collective integrity will always be questioned, their collective track record won’t matter, and that will be that.”
Now imagine this scenario being repeated over and over again as scandal rocks each professional sport. Pretty soon, the only people watching will be those who have money on the outcome.
When I was in Reno last year, Zsu Zsu and I were in the casino playing the quarter slots when we heard this huge roar go up from about 300 people who were watching a college basketball game on the big screen at the bar. I thought to myself “Must be a lot of St. John’s fans here for that kind of a reaction.” The fate of St. John’s basketball team was not the cause of the ruckus as I was to find out a little later. Whether they won or lost was immaterial to the gamblers. It was the point spread that mattered – the point differential between the winning and losing teams. And the roar was because an opposing player made two free throws with 4 seconds left that ended up beating the spread and winning money for a lot of people.
Tim Donaghy is alleged to have deliberately called bogus fouls and other imaginary violations in order to beat or stay within the spread. A weak argument can be made that his actions did not affect who won or lost the game but it hardly matters. The sin is in his having utter contempt for the integrity of the game. Besides, no one would believe he didn’t effect the actual outcome of the game for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that calling fouls on a team’s star player (or not calling fouls) affects the way that player will play the game. If a star player gets in foul trouble early, he is more apt to be less aggressive in his play thus negating much of what makes him a superior player in the first place. That argument may be made in court but it won’t wash with fans.
The NBA is in deep trouble. Donaghy, who will turn himself in this week, is said to have agreed to cooperate with the FBI in their investigation. If it is revealed that there are indeed other officials involved in this scandal, it could very well destroy the league. As it is now, fans will be watching NBA games with extra care next year and wondering.
Always wondering.
Rick Moran blogs at <a href=”http://www.rightwingnuthouse.com/”Right Wing Nut House
You missed what I consider the most likely alternative with “The question has always been how much of the horrid officiating in the NBA game was the result of incompetence and how much was due to the gamblers?”, namely that the bad officiating is at the behest of the NBA. They don’t want “blow-outs”, they don’t want “star players” on the bench, and they don’t want small market teams in the playoffs.
Consider Shaq in the low post… he catches the ball, the defender is stationary behind him with his arms raised, Shaq pivots and drives his shoulder into the defender to create space… it’s ruled a defensive foul 99.9% of the time when, by the rules of basketball, such a move is an offensive foul. Since all refs call the obvious offensive foul a defensive foul then one can only conclude that (a) the refs don’t know the rules, which I’ll admit is entirely possible or (b) they’ve been instructed to not call it an offensive foul.
However, gambling and crooked refs might be the least of the NBA’s worries. You can’t have a quality product if a high school kid is the best player in the game. I guess it’s hard to find thugs with talent, or maybe it’s just hard to train the thugs to develop the skills necessary to fully utilize their talents – they are thugs after all.
Two corrections:
First, the Immaculate Reception was during a Divisional Playoff Game, not the conference Championship.
Second, the NFL had an instat replay system in use from 1986 to 1992.
Hockey refs have it very tough, as illegal actions can occur far from the puck, and the speed of the game is intensely high. Fortunately, it is really quite difficult for players or refs to “shave points” in a game. A crooked ref in the NFL can be overturned by colleauges or instant replay. Additionally, their calls get far more individual attention by the public and television announcers.
An NBA ref makes foul calls in relatively rapid succession (unlike hockey), and the game doesn’t have the extended stops for review (unlike the NFL, even pre-replay, had considerable review per call).
All the sports are vulnerable to cheating at some level, but basketball is by far the easiest for a single official to influence.
What did the other–honest–refs know or think about Donaghy?
As an NBA season ticket holder, am I entitled to some sort of refund for a possibly defective product? David Stern stated yesterday that there was no way of knowing that this was happening. Is this so? What level of care does a professioanl sports league owe its fans to insure the integrity of the product?
I say all of this as a claims manager who knows that the outcome of this will be tied up in class action litigation for years to come. The lawyers will get fat and the paying fans will wind up with coupons for foam fingers when this shakes out.
The vultures are spreading their wings.
What’s the over/under on how long this drags on?
The points sited about the Immaculate Reception are incorrect. No instant replay was used, the equipment did not exsist in the booths at that time. Swearingen called to the booth to confirm with McNally that touchdown was the correct call. Swearingen thought that it was and McNally told him it was the correct call.
“It was also said that Swearingen was terrified that if he ruled the pass incomplete that he would have been mobbed by the thousands of Steelers fans who had rushed the field following the touchdown believing the Steelers had won the game.” – You are correct, but consider the source…it was only John Madden (the head coach of the Raiders who lost the game) who made this allegation…
All Phoenix is up in arms over Donaghy & Co.’s questionable officiating of Suns/Spurs Game 3. If interested, you can view the tape at http://exurbanleague.com/2007/07/23/death-of-a-league.aspx
“All the sports are vulnerable to cheating at some level, but basketball is by far the easiest for a single official to influence.”
Clearly, you are not a soccer fan.
All the problems basketball has are endemic to soccer as well, except that soccer lacks the cushion of being a high scoring game where a single play rarely decides the outcome. Soccer is by far the most corrupt team sport on the planet.
Not that I’m defending the NBA or the dreadful state of American basketball under its leadership.
“David Stern stated yesterday that there was no way of knowing that this was happening.”
This is the real problem. Donaghy was given a rating of “above average” last year, good enough that he was tapped to officiate in the conference finals. The dude was intentionally cheating, and no one noticed. Meanwhile, how many incompetent refs are sliding by, earning positive marks for substandard play?
The NBA must find some objective standard for calling fouls. Curly Smith’s comment about Shaq is telling: even if he’s wrong, and O’Neal is not actually receiving preferential treatment, you still have a massive perception problem. (And btw, Curly is not wrong.) The Donaghy case is only going to exacerbate it.
>>> 7 of 10 U.S. adults placed some sort of wager in the last year
The piece is all well and good, but that statistic does not even pass the giggle test. Even if you counted church bingo and scratch off lottery cards, it doesn’t come close to that by an order of magnitude.
The lack of shock here is almost hillarious. What I find som absolutely sweet in the irony department is that anyone who has given a rat’s rear about ANY NBA team in the past twenty years has seen the fix in. WE’VE SEEN IT, knew it all along, yadda.
This, in truth, may be the beginning of a cleansing that this sport has needed since the days of Bird & Johnson. It will also, over time, help American players realize that the rest of the world isn;t listening to the NBA, and will call the fouls on those who actually commit them- rather than on those who don’t have the proper NBA “clout”.
Honestly, and no offense meant at all if this “investigation” truly surprises ANYONE; but anyone who is truly surprised by this, or even CLAIMING they are surprised by this are either completely naive, or drawing a living, in some way, from the NBA.
Anyone with eyes has known about this crap for decades.
celebrim said: “Soccer is by far the most corrupt team sport on the planet.”
- No wonder it is the most popular sport among socialist countries.
Don’t forget the Serie A scandal in Italy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Serie_A_scandal
In addition to bets on which team will win by what point spread, there are over under bets on the total number of points scored, bets on individual quarters and halves, and sometimes bets on individual player performances. Since an official cheating to assist gambling doesn’t necessarily involve who wins, or even the point spread, it’s easy to see how Donaghy was able to get away with it for a while. In retrospect patterns may be visible, but in real time who is going to really notice that one or the other or both teams is over the limit for team fouls early in the quarter? By calling a lot of fouls early, putting both teams over the limit for team fouls, a referee can increase the odds that the score will be high, affecting over/under bets.
One of the reasons why a crooked ref can get away with it is that professional leagues don’t always follow the rule book to the letter of the law, allowing some discretion to the official. I doubt any Major League Baseball umpires call the strike zone exactly how it is in the rule book. The NBA threw away the rule book on traveling for Michael Jordan. When I see kids and teens playing basketball I always ask them how many steps can you take driving to the basket and none of them know. NHL refs are notorious for “putting away the whistle” and “letting them play”, at the end of close playoff games.
1993 Sonics/Suns
Bad officiating has been on the verge of criminal for years. Maybe it’s been criminal all along.
This is why baseball is the only professional sport out there. They have professional umpires, not some
guy they pay $500 to show up. Basketball has long been ruled by the refs. How many games are there where the difference in the final score is greater than the difference in the free-throws?
“Consider Shaq in the low post… ”
I see your Shaq in the low post, and raise you the Michael Jordan Palming and Traveling Exceptions. Charles Barkley once did a segment where he demonstrated, with video, how Jordan’s head fake to spin away to fading jumper started with an obvious, hand completely under the ball, palm. There where a few nervous chuckles and you never heard of it again. Then a couple of years later the NBA finally decides to “crackdown” on it when people start to notice that you can only get away with it if you have a shoe named after you.
Not naming names, but my favorite team lost a (women’s) Final Four game a decade ago. This team had a player who almost never fouled. She was one of the stars, and she got a lot of playing time, but it was unusual for her to finish a game with even one foul called against her.
In that Final Four game, she fouled out. Without exaggeration, it was almost certainly the first time in her life that she’d fouled out. The network showed an instant replay of her last “foul,” clearly showing that no foul had occurred. The commentators’ dialog went like this:
“That doesn’t like like a foul.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Aw, you hate to see a call like that happen.”
“You’d hate to foul out on a call like that.”
“And in the Final Four, to boot.”
“Yeah, I hate stuff like that.”
The player in question knew exactly what had happened. She had class enough not to talk about it; but the next year, she didn’t even come out for the basketball team. She was also a star in another sport at the same school, and went on to win an NCAA championship with her team in that other sport, before she graduated.
I always wondered how much money the ref got for destroying that woman’s dream.
kwo touches on Stern’s biggest dilemma of all. During his press conference he insisted that his league’s security apparatus was as robust, thorough and diligent as could be, yet Donaghy (and possibly others) still slipped by them. This means one of two things. One possibility is that Stern remains in denial and/or CYA mode, If that’s the case, and it comes to light that there is rome for improvement in NBA security after all, Stern will have to explain to the team owners, the players, the media and the Feds why this was never done, and in the end we may well see a palace coup at NBA HQ. The league may yet be able to recover somewhat from this mess, but only over a very long time.
But if Stern’s statement is on the level, and the league really was doing all it could to police itself, the upshot for the league may be far, far worse. That’s because Stern’s statement would then amount to a tacit admission that NBA basketball, by its very nature, is so wide open to corruption that no amount of policing can ever guarantee that the sport is on the up-and-up. That, in turn, would forever destroy any hope of recovery, and put the NBA permanently into WWE territory.
here is a blog that has been all over the donaghy scandal
http://www.notthegame.com