Officiating

i have always known that stern sleeps in a filthy bed with mobsters. just look at the referee scandal and how quickly it was resolved. Should that guy still be handling games? No way. Big market teams get big calls. It is sick to me….. oden 4 prez

It serves to remind us of our own imperfections and have us reflect on them.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure most people see it this way. All too often I see “If it wasn’t for those [expletive] refs, we would have [expletive] won the [expletive] game!” But we have to have referees, and referees are human, therefore referees will miss calls, sometimes crucial ones. But that human element is why it is necessary to play 82 games. After a sample size that big, all the human errors and anomalies work themselves out, and we know who really deserves to be in the playoffs and at what seed. Even the [expletive] from Los Angeles. A seven game series serves the same purpose. A series isn’t lost on the last possession of game seven, it’s lost well before then. This call at this time probably balances out a missed call in your favor earlier. It’s statistics. It all averages out in the end.

I reserve the right to change my mind when the Blazers’ season starts this fall.

I don’t remember what year, but it was game six.

A three pointer CLEARLY before time expired didn’t count. Another three pointer didn’t count. A two pointer was waived off. It was an 8 point difference of CLEAR bad calls… the bulls won by 8.

I think the refs do pay favorites. I think the game is rigged… to a point. I think that teams HAVE to be good enough to overcome that. I think the Spurs were.

I don’t think it’s every game. I do think refs sometimes just make bad calls… but if you’re going to make a bad call, I think they make it on the side of the team they want to win.

I was always taught if you need a call to win a game then you weren’t better than the other team. You may have been as good, but you didn’t prove you were better.

I still think this applies in just about every situation where bad calls play a role. The Cardinals lost game 7 after the infamous Denkinger call. The Spurs were down with 3 seconds to go. They shouldn’t be in the situation where they need a call to bail them out.
That isn’t to say that it doesn’t suck that they didn’t get a chance to shoot free throws, it just means they lost the series and it was pretty clear that LA was the better team.

The basketball is by far the most difficult sport to referee. Every thing the ref’s make is a judgement call. The closest equilivent I can think of is pass interference with football, but the problem is that in basketball, every call is pass interference, not just a couple of calls a game. Because of this, referee mistakes and bad calls are going to be an unfortunate way of life.

The probem is not so much that bad calls happen, it’s that hey happen disproportionately to certain players and teams. How many times have you have you been watching a game on TV and the announcer says something about a young player like, “In a few years, he’s gonna get that call.” It happens almost every game and goes to show that bias is not only apparent, but also accepted.

If they league truly wants to get rid of these ‘conspiracy theories’ once and for all, they will find a way to not only make fouls uniform from player to player, and from ref to ref as well. So many referes call games differently that it leaves everything open to interpretation and takes accountability away.

Whether it be more training, performance reviews, or video review, the gap needs to be closed between different players and different refs to make a foul a foul depending on what ref is calling the game or what players are playing it. Only then will the conspiracy theories go away for good.

one can simply look at the plea confession of Donaghy. He was getting paid to provide the names of the referees before the games. That alone allowed the gamblers to add or subtract points from their formula and illustrates that referees do decide the outcome of games. This is a factor that has gone un-addressed by the league.

In baseball this disparity also exists but K-zone evaluations have slowly brought more uniformity. NBA had the ability to evaluate every play and we are told they do just that for the referees. But they refuse to provide any substantial indicators of accountability from those reviews. We can hope that this review will slowly bring uniformity both within games and between games. Referees need to be largely invisible including the TV posing before each game.

Same thing in boxing. A title challenger has to win a decision by more than 51% to get the nod from the judges. When you’re fighting the king of the hill, it’s not enough to bring him to his knees. You have to kick him off the summit.

Someone mentioned pass interference in football and how it is a the toughest call in football. This poster likened basketball ref-ing to making that call game long and there is some truth to that. However, I notice that I pretty much know what pass interference is. I can see it the contact and I basically know when it has happened and what constitutes a foul and what doesn’t . B-ball is different. The rules are nebulous and there isn’t a clear cut set of guidelines as what a foul is let alone the vagaries of how a particular ref is calling the games. I give you all a challange …explain what is a charge is. When is it a charge or when not? When I was a kid in the late 70’s-early 80s the defender has to get his position established and that required a beat or so before contact or else the offesive guy got the call. That isn’t how it is called now. Now the defender just has to get in front of the guy with the ball. His feet can be sliding, he can be not square to the offesive player and still get the call. I don’t think the acutal rule has changed, but I can’t prove it since there isn’t really a resource for a fan to understand it. This true for almost any rule of the game you choose. That means the Refs are pretty much making it up as they go along and this as much anything else prompts the backlash that refs get from fans.

Anyway thats my rant of the night…back to making smart aleck comments and Dr Suess poems

I was pulled out of the stands to ref an 8th grade game because they didn’t have anyone else when I was 18. I sucked, and I consider myself to be above average as far as understanding the rules. It gave me a huge perspective about what a ref goes through, the pressures he/she’s feeling, and how overwhelming it can be.

I still complain about it though. It’s a fan’s RIGHT.

That is, that without being explicitly told which teams to favor, the officials are made aware in a number of ways “which way their bread is buttered.” Of course, the San Antonio Spurs seem to be the debunker of that theory, as you wrote. How can the success of an unpopular, small market team like the Spurs serve the nefarious interests of the league? Yet again and again-at least until this season-the Spurs have benefitted from questionable calls and rulings.

I was stumped by that one until someone pointed out something to me. That is: David Stern’s dream is for the league to go global. That’s the big picture for him. And internationally, the Spurs are one of the most popular teams because they’ve had so many international players. Duncan, Parker, & Ginobli in particular-the Spurs’ “Big Three”-are foreign players with huge followings abroad. Other teams have followed the Spurs in signing lots of foreigners, but the Spurs were certainly at the forefront when they were getting the benefit of all those whistles.

So while the Spurs are indeed a “small market” team on the domestic level, on an international level they’re huge. Just not as huge as the Lakers—now that they have so many foreign players on THEIR roster! (Cue video of that non-call on Derek Fisher vs Brent Barry.) Time to rev up your conspiracy engine again, Dave!

how many times can we say with certainty that the better team lost due exclusively to the officiating?

Nothing new. I’ve heard the “they have a difficult job” theories. Lots of people have difficult jobs. So what.

The refs have powerful forces on their side and they are next to impossible to fire. You’d have to prove bias. Good luck.

On the other hand it’s embarassing how many grown players act like children on the court when they feel they should’ve gotten a call. More than ANYTHING, that’s what the NBA should be addressing. These players know the refs are bad, yet they’ve signed contracts stating they’ll play under these conditions, and they are being paid millions to do so. SO THEY SHOULD SHUT UP AND PLAY.