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.
