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As the Tim Donaghy scandal roared through the sports
world, it drew a variety of public responses. David Stern held a press
conference looking appropriately distraught, composed, weary, and humbled
(by David Stern standards). Ideas poured in from sportswriters and fans
alike for improving the likelihood of catching a tainted ref and decreasing
the odds (pardon the poor choice of words) of having a ref on the take. Most
of these ideas were fatally flawed and ignored the root problem: NBA
referees just haven’t been doing a very good job. We’ll first look at the
ideas thrown out there and see what useful pieces can be taken from them,
and then try to fit the pieces together to solve the NBA refereeing puzzle.
Make the referees accessible to the media
Some in the media have let their egos run wild and
decided that sportswriters would root out all evil in sports if only they
could talk to the principles involved. If only the media had been allowed to
vet Donaghy, they cry, he would’ve never gotten away with it as long as he
did. This claim has no basis in reality. The media had plenty of access to
Mike Vick, yet they knew nothing about him allegedly being a major figure in
the dog fighting underworld. The media had plenty of access to baseball
players and glorified them, not saying a word about the decades of steroid
use until it was brought to light by government investigations and
confessions by former players.
In summary:
- Mike Vick as dog fighting kingpin: unearthed by the federal
government
- Steroid use in baseball: the feds
- NBA ref under mob control: the feds
- Alex Rodriguez’ attraction to manly female strippers: the media
The sports media isn’t good at investigative reporting.
It’s just not in the nature of sports reporting to be trying to break
scandals before even the government gets wind of the situation. Until recent
decades, the sports media did not cover athletes’ off field indiscretions,
and to this day the off field concerns don’t stretch further than players’
personal relationships and arrests.
If refs had post game press conferences, they’d just be
inundated with beat writers asking about particular calls, mostly asking why
the home team didn’t get call X or Y. The odds of a crooked ref being dumb
enough to be tripped up by this questioning are very small.
The valid take-aways from this idea are that refs
shouldn’t be beyond public questioning and should have to answer for
particularly odd calls. NBA players and coaches should not be automatically
fined for questioning refereeing. Making refs available to the media may
give fans more confidence in decisions when they hear explanations from the
referees themselves, but having this be a game after game occurrence will
serve little purpose. If there is a particularly controversial call,
especially in a playoff game, the league should make refs available if only
to satiate fans and make the refereeing process more transparent. This will
do nothing to prevent another mob controlled referee, but would be a step
toward better refereed games and more public acceptance of calls.
Pay the referees more money
The proponents of this idea would like to think that
you can price out bookies and the mob. They also like to throw out the
theory that today’s pro athletes would never throw a game for gambling
purposes because they have too much money.
The problem is that those with a gambling addiction can
blow through any amount of money. This goes for people who are simply bad at
managing money as well. An extreme case of the latter is Mike Tyson, who has
made over $100,000,000 in his career and has virtually nothing left. If
referees were paid more, those with gambling issues would just place larger
bets and end up in even more debt.
Besides, it’s not like these guys are poor. As Stern
pointed out, Donaghy made $260,000 last year. That’s not a player’s salary,
but it still puts Donaghy in the top few percent of Americans.
Raising salaries may not be a bad idea, but only if the
salary increases are aimed at infusing talent into the refereeing pipeline.
The NBA referee lifestyle is not an easy one. It requires a lot of travel
during the season and constant criticism from thousands of drunken
partisans, not to mention the angry millionaires who you are charged with
keeping under control. At best, you do a great job and no one publicly
notices. At worst, your failures are replayed and ridiculed continuously
worldwide. The starting salary for a rookie ref is around $90,000. That may
need to increase substantially if the league wants to improve the quality of
its referees, but would need to increase nearly infinitely if the league
wants to guarantee that refs have too much money to accrue gambling debt.
Eliminate fouling out
This idea has been sporadically pushed over the years,
most notably by Pete Newell back in the 1980s after the NBA’s last gambling
scandal involving a timekeeper. The idea is that a ref can greatly impact a
game simply by calling a few fouls on a star player. As the NBA is the only
major pro sports league in which a player can foul out, teams will bench a
player who has a lot of fouls early in the game in order to assure the
player’s availability late in the game. If this power were to be taken from
a referee (and instead, each foul a player commits beyond his 5th would
include some harsher punishment like 2 free throws and possession for the
other team) then refs would have less ability to control the outcome of the
game. This type of rule was in place in NBA summer leagues (except with the
first extra penalty foul being the 10th instead of the 6th) until this
summer, mostly because summer leagues tend to have ragged refereeing and the
league didn’t want that to limit young players’ playing time and
development.
The biggest problem with this is that it does nothing
to prevent a Donaghy situation. Donaghy’s shady refereeing is alleged to
consist of controlling games to influence the over/under, not the actual
result of the game. This means that Donaghy would call more fouls (and thus
award more free throws) if the mob had bet on the over. Changing the rules
this way does nothing to prevent this activity and actually makes it easier
for a crooked ref to control the game scoring total (the extra penalty
replacing fouling out creates more points if the ref calls a foul on a
player who has already been called for 5 or more fouls). The mob doesn’t
particularly care which team wins the game as long as they themselves win
their bet. This proposed rule change is basically a show of no confidence in
referees and doesn’t address the crooked ref issue.
The other problem with this idea is that such a rule
change would fundamentally alter the game of basketball. Depth and bench
strength would be mostly useless as teams would have no reason to take out a
starter unless he was tired. Players would gamble more on defense and play
more physically, knowing that there is nothing to worry about with regard to
fouls. It would pretty much turn into soccer in the sense that fouls are
pretty meaningless unless you really hit someone hard and get a flagrant
(yellow card in soccer) or get tossed (red card). Imagine if a guy like Shaq
could foul to his heart’s content with no worry of charging calls or
defensive fouls sending him to the bench.
Another minor concern is that the international rules
and college rules would not change just because the NBA makes a change,
which would make it harder for incoming players to transition to the NBA and
for NBA players to transition to the international game for the Olympics and
other competitions.
With quality consistent refereeing, it’d be on the
players to know their personal foul situation and to alter their play
accordingly. This has been a tenant of organized basketball the entire
modern era and it should take more than just a crooked referee to change
something so fundamental to the game.
Keep Referee Crews Together
This is perhaps the best of the main stream ideas in
terms of preventing corrupt refereeing. The current NBA system ends up
mixing and matching crews on seemingly a game by game basis. If refs worked
together in the same 3 man (note to the PC police: this is not a sexist term
but merely a nod to common usage, and Violet Palmer should’ve been fired
years ago anyway) crews on a regular basis and one ref became tainted, the
other two may be familiar enough with the now-crooked ref to detect the
change.
It could be argued that by keeping crews together the
NBA would bring in the possibility of an entire crew being corrupted and
being harder to detect because they wouldn’t have to work with clean refs.
However, keeping referee crews together doesn’t mean that they never work
with other refs, just that they work with each other for the bulk of their
games. Additionally, it is much harder to buy an entire three man referee
crew than to get one troubled ref. Also, the more people that are in on a
conspiracy, the harder it is to keep quiet.
In addition to the potential for better fraudulent
refereeing detection, this system would likely lead to better refereeing in
general. Each crew member would get comfortable with his crewmates and learn
what they look for and how they position themselves and adjust accordingly,
leading to more consistency and, hopefully, accuracy of calls. The league
could assign new refs to work on a crew with elite and experienced refs who
could take the new guys under their wings and provide a mentoring system.
The Real Solution
The real solution to the NBA’s problem (and really,
it’s not just an NBA problem but a sports-wide issue – several major soccer
leagues have been hit and it’s fairly likely that there have been tainted
refs in other major American professional sports) is to have better and more
consistent refereeing. Basketball is arguably the hardest sport to referee,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable for NBA officiating to be a
source of jokes, frustration, and conspiracy theories (even before the
Donaghy situation went public). Many others have pointed out that it was
telling that when people heard that an NBA ref was under mob control, the
reaction of the basketball public was not shock at the possibility but
rather curiosity as to which ref it was. In true ironic American fashion,
there were undoubtedly office pools for betting on which NBA referee was
being investigated for gambling, aiding gambling, and altering games. My
personal telling moment came when I heard Stern’s press conference and found
out that one of the charges against Donaghy was that he provided information
to the mob, likely information regarding refereeing schedules. The fact that
knowing which referees are assigned to which games is highly valuable
information to gamblers is a major sign that there is far more wrong in the
NBA refereeing world than Tim Donaghy.
The first step toward better refereeing is re-educating
the current refs on the rules and how they should be applied and then
forcing them to apply these rules evenly to all players. This means no more
rookie hazing and no more star calls. The rules should apply the same to all
players, regardless of what it says on the front or back of their jerseys. I
don’t care what kind of endorsement deals Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade have,
they shouldn’t be treated any differently than other players. Take a look at
which NBA stars struggle in international competition – it’s often the guys
who are used to being bailed out by the NBA refs based on their Nike
contracts.
The second step is a continuation of the first –
dedication to the game plan. I know from personal experience that people
will resist changes management makes, especially when they run counter to
what has always been the case and if management has had many short lived and
half-hearted attempts at change in the past. There has to be a commitment to
this new equality philosophy. Referees are human and there will be some
differences from ref to ref, but on the whole the same play should be called
the same way by every ref the vast majority of the time regardless of who is
involved. This may be troublesome due to the referee union, but pay raises
and playoff assignments should be awarded on the merit of the referee and
not simply on tenure.
The third step is recruiting. Stern and company have to
imagine that they are a new coach coming into a storied college program that
has been mediocre in recent years. They have all the resources in the world
but they need to pull more and better talent. Recruit worldwide. Raise the
salary and incentives for referees (think Alabama boosters aren’t out there
delivering cash-filled suitcases around the nation to help Nick Saban’s
recruiting efforts as he rebuilds?). Start referee academies and get younger
people to commit to the profession who otherwise may go into something else
like law or business. Do whatever it takes to draw more talented individuals
into the profession, develop them, and keep them.
Surrounding these steps should be a campaign to put to
rest the conspiracy theories and rebuild public trust. The only way to do
that is transparency. Make the referee reviews public. They’re purely based
on things from watching game films anyway, and those games are available to
the public so it’s not like you’re giving out private information about
employee performance. Make referee schedules public earlier and see if the
betting lines move (on a tangent, Vegas is one of the NBA’s best resources
in any fight against gambling-based corruption as Vegas stands to lose lots
of money when games are tainted – thus having lots of motivation to stop
such occurrences – and has much more expertise than the league does on
gambling matters). If they do, clearly you have work to do. Invite a few
media members to embed themselves in the referee review process (as the NBA
did a few years ago with their draft lottery process to alleviate fears that
it was rigged) and allow them to make the process public (off course you’re
allowed to edit out sensitive information, but don’t try to make them write
PR brochures for you). Stern said he will do whatever it takes to ensure
another Donaghy situation doesn’t happen to the NBA, and I do believe him
when he says it, but he’d be wise to announce to the world what steps the
league will take and have some public follow-up to report on the success of
the measures.
The Donaghy situation was a terrible shock to the NBA,
but hopefully it will be one that leads to positive change. The NBA is at a
crossroads. The league can try to sweep this situation under the rug, make
some security changes and initiate a PR blitz or it can finally address the
real problem it’s had for years – the declining quality of refereeing, which
has reached the point that a referee under mob control was actually one of
the higher rated referees in the league. Maybe when Stern says he will seek
expert guidance, he’s saying that he’ll ask the mob how to improve his lousy
referees and make an easy buck at the same time.
comments? email us at comments@osfan.com
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