Cheating Refs.

[Diesel]

Big Story does exactly what Stern wants...

Disappears.

The cheating ref said that other refs makes calls based on relationships with players and coaches.

Watching Basketball, I believe it.

Like the KG push!!

[mattlanta]

Yeah, there's no way all of the refs are legit. Unfortunately, it's probably been like this for a very long time now. I don't think we can do much about it at this point.

[TruJerz]

NBA Refs are the worst out of all the major sports..even wrestling(WWE) Refs are better lol

[AtLaS]

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NBA Refs are the worst out of all the major sports..even wrestling(WWE) Refs are better lol

I'll copy/paste what I wrote in a similar thread on RealGM.

If you fire current officials and bring in new ones it would make the situation MUCH worse, because believe it or not, these are by far the best officials. Reffing the NBA is the hardest sport because the players are so big and strong, athletic, and they constantly flop which makes it very tough to keep track of everything at one time.

Flopping has gotten out of control, and that's mainly what makes it so difficult. In no other sport is flopping that big an issue, namely because it's just not possible in baseball, and in football if you attempt a flop and don't get it, you'll give up a touchdown thus making the risk for it much greater.

In no other sport do the refs have to interfere as much because there are fouls, travels, 3 seconds, techs, subs, shot clocks, etc SO many more things going on with basketball than any other sport. In a typical basketball game there are WAY more calls than any other sport for this reason, and since there are WAY more calls, there are way more bad calls. The facts are that sometimes you'll get terrible calls against you, but the other team will also get terrible calls. It will always be that way.

[TruJerz]

in general, yes reffing basketball is very hard but if you watch the college game or even highschool, you will see that the game is reffed much better than it is in the NBA. NBA Refs can decide a game where as in college, the players can play alot more and get away with alot more too..im will never say reffing an NBA is easy but i think they take advantage of having that whistle

[AtLaS]

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in general, yes reffing basketball is very hard but if you watch the college game or even highschool, you will see that the game is reffed much better than it is in the NBA.

That is because reffing high school and college is a downright cakewalk compared to the NBA. The NBA consists of the top and most gifted athletes in the world, some of them are strong as hell and it's hard to tell what's a foul and not a foul. That's why reffing Shaq was one of the hardest things in history. Lesser leagues don't argue as much either. The shot clock is also much less of a factor, there is no defensive 3 second rule, there is no hand check rule (correct me if I'm wrong on that one), goal tending is rarely a part of the game. Players get up and down the court much faster making it harder to see things.

Not to mention, college players and especially high schoolers are nowhere NEAR as good at flopping, nor do they attempt it as much. The reason it's so tough to judge flops is because a ref has to watch so many other things going on at the same time, especially on off the ball flops. A flop happens in milliseconds, a player falls down when in the side of your eye it looked like there was contact. Officials don't just watch one matchup, they have to cover an entire side of the floor. In a split second it's very tough to guage whether or not it was a flop or not.

Don't get me wrong, there are things that can be fixed, but NBA reffing is going to be considered bad no matter who officiates the games. Since there are more calls by officials in basketball than any other sport (this isn't NBA restricted, this is basketball in general), there will subsequently be more BAD calls than any other sport. That's just how it is.

[dlpin]

that would be true if errors were random. Unfortunately, they are not. Stars and home teams get the favorable calls most of the time. If it was just a matter of being hard to tell what really happened, the errors would go both ways.

As we are now hearing from Donaghy, part of all of this is intentional: relationships and so on. And that is plain to see: some refs react to Rasheed by letting him get away with way too much, while others are way too strict, all based on reputation and relationships.

And part of this is subconscious: no one wants to be booed, or to be the one drawing national headlines for clashing with a star. Had Joey Crawford done what he did to Tim Duncan to a random 12th player, he would never had been suspended, and refs know that: mess up against a star= league and media attention.

[Guest]

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that would be true if errors were random. Unfortunately, they are not

That is true. A year or two ago there was a paper done on bias in reffing for basketball. They concluded that white officials were biased to call more fouls on black players and I believe vice-versa for black officials (I could be wrong, its been a while). This bias along with Donaghy now stating a relationship bias really shows that reffing in the NBA is not fair. Random errors would be acceptable, but they just aren't. I am sure a study would show that the older you get in the NBA (tenure) the less fouls are called on you and the younger you are the more. One could argue its because of "experience" but another plausible argument is simply "relationship". It takes a while to build up relationships with refs to be able to "get" the calls.

[AHF]

That report wasn't nearly as significant as the headlines made it out to be.

Here is what Hollinger wrote about it:

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But the bigger point that everyone is missing is that, in fact, the academic study showed remarkably little bias as well. Maybe I'm a cynic here, but I had expected there would be some level of bias by both black and white officials -- refs are human too, after all, and when they step on the court they unwittingly bring their life experiences and values with them.

Yet the effect is almost totally insignificant. The study reports that a black player will rack up approximately 0.16 added fouls per 48 minutes with an all-white officiating crew, as compared to an all-black one.

In other words, if he plays 3,190 minutes in a season -- the league-leading total posted by LeBron James this year -- he would pick up 11 extra fouls. Eleven.

Even that scenario depends on the difference between all-black and all-white crews, which isn't realistic -- in reality most games will be officiated by a mixed crew (32 percent of the league's officials are black), so the effect will be much smaller. Thus, the difference between a black player and white player of similar skills and abilities might be something like six or seven fouls all season, out of the 200 or more that most players accumulate in a season. That's if you lead the league in minutes, mind you -- it would be much less for anyone else.

So when the authors talk about a noticeable impact on results, I guess it depends on what they mean by "noticeable." The authors chose to play up the fact that a bias was found, but to me it's even more of a story that it was found to be so small.

[Guest]

When they talk about there being a significant bias, that means statistically significant which isn't the same as culturally/socially significant. Hollinger is just doing a play on words, he knows that the paper was talking about there being a statistically significant bias but he knows the general public does not understand this and tries to spin the article.

I know it isn't meant to be this whole big story that there is a bias in the NBA, if there was a bias that was socially significant you would probably be able to tell without having to do any statistical analysis. The analysis is meant to show you something you cannot see just watching the game. I think that seeing this information combined with Donaghy's allegations may lead us to see that there is a bias within the referees. That would be interesting to see, but right now we don't have enough information to see this.

Note: I don't mean to say that this bias is intentional. The bias could simply be subconscious which doesn't make the bias right but it does mean it isn't an overt act of bias.

[jhay610]

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Flopping has gotten out of control, and that's mainly what makes it so difficult. In no other sport is flopping that big an issue

soccer is the original flopper's sport. I love the theatrics. A guy loses the ball and collapses, writhing in pain. They bring a stretcher out, the whole nine yards, then he gets up and plays the rest of the game as if nothing ever happened.

A lot of the foreign players are the masters of this "art" in the NBA, and now everyone does it.

[dlpin]

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That report wasn't nearly as significant as the headlines made it out to be.

First of all, as Hawksfanatic pointed out, "significant" in statistical terms is different from "significant" in every day language. When something is significant in statistics, it means that there is enough information to be fairly confident (usually 95% confident) that a value is different from a certain hypothesis. In this case, there is enough information to feel confident that the impact of race on officiating is different than 0 (if it was 0 there would be no bias). In any case, Hollinger was being disingenuous here. The study analized not only the number of fouls, but also overall results for the teams. Lebron might have picked up on average just 11 fouls in a season, but a basketball game is made up of 10 players, five on each team, and 48 minutes of play. So it doesnt matter how many fouls Lebron got in his favor, but how many were affected in a game. 0.16 fouls going differently per 48 minutes means 1.6 a game, over 120 a season per team. Furthermore, their study also analizes how many games would have gone differently, and found that 1.8% of games per season have their outcomes changed because of own race bias. Of course, it is hard to determine who beneffited from this, and who didnt, but in any case, just as a reminder, the distance between the lakers and the suns was 2 games.

But secondly, and most important, this study analized just the matters of race. And that is far from being the only influence on officiating (and it still affected 1.8% of games!). Add to that non-analized but quite plausible effects of home crowds, star treatment, experience and long standing relationships in the league and all of the sudden claiming that 10% of games have their outcomes altered by refs mistakes does not seem so far fetched.

I was disgusted by the league and by most sports networks in their treatment of this research. The sort of personal attacks they resorted to against a young professor and grad student was just classless. No wonder when other specialists verified what the researchers had to say ESPN and other networks dropped the issue in a second. Just like tnt and espn usually avoid replays of controversial calls. Just like now no one even dares raise the "seattle" and "fraud" questions when talking to nba officials. Heck, ESPN columns already were talking about "the disappointment in OKC" when the sonics dropped to 4.

[dlpin]

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Flopping has gotten out of control, and that's mainly what makes it so difficult. In no other sport is flopping that big an issue

soccer is the original flopper's sport. I love the theatrics. A guy loses the ball and collapses, writhing in pain. They bring a stretcher out, the whole nine yards, then he gets up and plays the rest of the game as if nothing ever happened.

A lot of the foreign players are the masters of this "art" in the NBA, and now everyone does it.

While soccer certainly has a lot of problems with flopping, at least officials there recognize the problem and have made recomendations that floppers be warned with a yellow card. In the NBA, players flop without any fear of negative repercussions.

[Guest]

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I was disgusted by the league and by most sports networks in their treatment of this research. The sort of personal attacks they resorted to against a young professor and grad student was just classless.

I agree, the grad student is being ripped by the media unmercilessly which is totally unwarranted. This is from unqualified individuals who are making this public to everyone and not allowing the grad student respond. At least when you are deffending it is essentially closed doors and you are against qualified professors.

I also find it funny how the NBA tries to defend not allowing public knowledge on fouls calls. They claim they have more extensive data than the paper and the NBA did their own research. Yet they don't publish or release the research they did or allow us to see the data. They say it is personnel information, all this leads to is conspiracy theories and distrust with the league.

[AHF]

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I was disgusted by the league and by most sports networks in their treatment of this research. The sort of personal attacks they resorted to against a young professor and grad student was just classless.

I agree, the grad student is being ripped by the media unmercilessly which is totally unwarranted. This is from unqualified individuals who are making this public to everyone and not allowing the grad student respond. At least when you are deffending it is essentially closed doors and you are against qualified professors.

I also find it funny how the NBA tries to defend not allowing public knowledge on fouls calls. They claim they have more extensive data than the paper and the NBA did their own research. Yet they don't publish or release the research they did or allow us to see the data. They say it is personnel information, all this leads to is conspiracy theories and distrust with the league.

Using the word "significant" when discussing statistics to imply anything other than "statistically significant" is a poor choice on my part.

I agree that the grad should not be bashed for his research. What he did was clearly statistically significant and to be explained the NBA really needs to introduce other variables or challenge his assumptions (like assuming that the player for whom the foul is called matches the demographic of the team). That said, are people arguing that Hollinger's numbers are wrong? If not, while the numbers are statistically significant I still don't think they add up to very much and leave the door wide open for some other variable accounting for the numbers (such as coaches using defensive specialists to foul at the end of quarters or games and said defensive specialists tending to be disproportionately black, etc.)

[jhay610]

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In the NBA, players flop without any fear of negative repercussions.

I believe stern is lobbying for this to be addressed. Probably take awhile for something tangible to materialize, if it ever does.

[Guest]

No Hollinger's numbers are right, but he is trying his best to make it seem like it is very very little. As dlpin pointed out, that is just one player and when you look collectively at a game you have 10 players who could potentially be black going against refs potentially all white which would add up to 1.6 fouls a game from bias (I haven't looked back at his post, so just going off what I think I remember).

In the paper, the grad and prof. go into greater detail and explain how they controlled certain variables. I wish I could find it online, but the best that I have found was a NYTimes article on it. Essentially in the end, they claim that the bias of the refs explains 1.8% of a win, so it is about 2 wins a year that are affected by the bias.

[dlpin]

here's the paper:

http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/NBARace.pdf

other interesting findings are that black players average almost half a point less per 48 minutes when the refs are white

[DrReality]

i heard they have implemented a grading system for the baseball refs. They hate it, but it's about time. And there needs to be something similar for the other sports.

[Guest]

Thanks for finding that, I'll take a glance through that later. Dlpin are you by chance involved in statistics/economics or is it just a hobby of yours?