Attorney drops bombshell accusations, argues for probation for Donaghy - ESPN Today NBA ref Donaghy told the court he was involved in fixing games. He suggests the refs and players were involved. When he got nailed the league had to fight to maintain some credibility. I read that many refs were involved but they let it go by saying they were only going to casinos. Why would that matter?
NBA basketball has a fatal flaw. Reffing is not background but an intrinsic part of the game. I have told my son for years games are being fixed. I turned off lots of games in disgust . Now it appears I was right.
Out of curiosity, what was it that you saw that clued you in to a fixed game?
The article doesn’t actually say the games were “fixed”. It says that the outcome was affected by the relationships of the officials with coaches and players. That’s really no surprise, considering the fact that some players seem to get all the calls, and the home court advantage includes going to the foul line 20 times more than the opponent.
Officiating is a serious issue for the NBA. I find it troublesome when sports talk guys mention unfair officiating “they won’t get THAT call in the Garden” and act like it’s just a normal part of the game.
A call went against his team.
No, really, that’s pretty much how people decide a game is fixed. While NBA officiating largely sucks, Donaghy’s credibility also sucks, and he’s trying to negotiate a plea. He could be telling the truth, but it’s hard to take anything he says at face value.
The Jordan Rules didn’t help. Neither did the short-lived Dwyane Wade era.
Several years ago, the Sacramento Kings would get fouls called on them right and left when playing against the Lakers in the Playoffs. During the same game series, one of the Lakers dropped an elbow on a King, drawing blood.
No foul.
Many people at that point came to the conclusion that the NBA has some rigging in their games. I haven’t really watched since then (work prohibits ball watching) but it always left a sour taste in my mouth.
It’s hard to determine whether a game was fixed or not. Donaghy might have survived the allegations if he hadn’t been so consistent over time in his fixing. They nailed him by analyzing his calls and recognizing a pattern, one that could not have been a coincidence.
Barring that, he might not be refereeing games anymore, but he wouldn’t be on his way to jail and the NBA might have been able to keep this quiet.
Los Angeles,New York, Chicago, all got the calls. Jordan rules is by definition league cheating. When the Pistons played Miami they got flagged for being on the same court as Wade. It was blatant . The article suggests an affiliation with the league.players and refs involved. I believe it. When there are billions involved the powers will not let nature take its course. They will direct as much as possible to get the most money making and best ratings possible. They did.
I think many people come to that conclusion whenever it’s convenient to them. Officiating in the NBA is horribly inconsistent and there are a lot of fouls called in an NBA game - but most of the time, you only hear complaints about games being rigged when a call goes against the accuser’s team. Fans are passionate and that makes this stuff hard to take seriously. People have been saying game are rigged forever and a lot of them crowed “I knew it!” when Donaghy got busted, but they were also expecting large-scale corruption to come to light, and so far it hasn’t.
Let’s say that’s the case. Does it really make sense that there would be some sort of favored team/revenue generation conspiracy when the parties involved would know that if the truth were to get out, the revenue would absolutely dry up, serious jail time would happen, and their lives would be irrevocably ruined. At the same time, the volume of people that must be in on the hidden truth and able to keep their mouths shut would be impossible to manage to the degree of secrecy needed.
Yes, reffing has it’s issues, especially when you consider the size/speed/strength/abilities of today’s player along with the failures of human nature. But, to chalk it up to a league wide decision to favor certain outcomes not only flies in the face of logic, it basically fits into the exact opposite of what a vaguely sane and reasonable person would choose to do, let alone a huge group of them.
Do you have any involvement in high school basketball? I do. Get close to a team and a fan base. After any game in which your team loses, listen to the fans. You will absolutely hear complaints about reffing, some going full fledged into the “they were paid off” camp. If your team wins, listen to the other team’s fans and you will hear the exact same conversation. Now, double the volume if it happens to be the home team that won or there was a vaguely questionable call anywhere in the fourth quarter. It may only be high school, but it’s a pretty good microcosm of the exact same thing we see in the NBA. Dicey calls made at game speed, two groups of fans watching with highly differing interests, human error with a whistle, human tendencies to focus on something (one team’s aggressiveness in creating contact) to the detriment of something else (the other team’s propensity to block shots from the weak side with very little contact) are all mixed in a blender where the output is guaranteed to leave half of the people watching mad because their favorable outcome was not realized.
It just happens. Go back to the early days of any sport and you’ll find people complaining about refs. Skip ahead 200 years and you’ll find cyborg human-monkey hybrids complaining that the Ref-O-Tron 8000X was programmed to favor the opposing Anti-Gravity Ball team because Mars has a larger revenue base than Venus.
Errors will continue to happen. Sometimes it impacts game outcomes. Refs will get caught up in moments and make calls that don’t make sense, but we also got to see the replay 12 times from 6 angles. Take a breath, know that sometimes bad things will happen, and know that the vast, vast, vast majority of the time the team that truly played better will be the team that won the game in spite of any extenuating circumstances.
I remember thinking during one of those series in the early 2000s that the league was desperate to make sure Sacramento wouldn’t make the finals. That would have been the ultimate ratings killer.
If the shots fall it is difficult to fix, You can not force every game. But you can impact a lot of them. Over a season you can decide who makes the playoffs.
The Pistons were playing one time and when they announced the refs my son said oh oh we are going to lose. He said we don’t get calls from that reffing crew. I was not that well versed on refs .
I knew I was offended at casual acceptance of Jordan rules. Then when the announcers say a budding super star should not expect those kind of calls until he earns them. What a different set of rules for different players is OK.
This article is too skimpy on details to mean anything. So I’ll just talk about more general issues:
The thing is, Marley and Mullinator there’s a widespread criticism of NBA refereeing that’s more sophisticated and supportable than ‘Waah! My team lost - it’s all the stupid referees’ fault!’
The critics don’t necessarily claim ‘large scale corruption’ or a smoking-gun game fixing. Myself, I certainly would be surprised if I found the league involved in fixing a particular game. What I do think is happening is that the league makes it explicitly clear that they want games refereed so as to reward ‘exciting’ individual offensive effort – traveling should be generally ignored if it leads to a dunk or layup, any contact at all on a shot is presumed to be a defensive foul, etc. All that is of course not unfair on the face of it, as long as everyone gets called the same way (though many basketball lovers find watching such a game less interesting than one that rewards team play). However, I believe the league also, unofficially but strongly, lets referees know that big, marketable stars very strongly deserve the benefit of the doubt on any foul calls. And that is the definition of bias.
The results of the league’s unofficial direction to referees are travesties like the Lakers-Kings game or D-Wade’s finals appearance: it’s not that Stern decreed that Miami would win, but he set the situation for them to win by ensuring that big stars have a huge advantage.
Again, it’s not just sore losers noting one or two bad calls: a lot of critics understand that basketball is very difficult to referee well, and that bad calls are inevitable. But when 80% of the mistakes go the same way throughout a game, series, and season, it’s not just random mistakes.
And it’s not just a few cranks: it’s basically an accepted fact among any more than casual fan that a star will get calls that an unheralded rookie won’t. The only question is how significant it is to the outcome of games.
Of course, any TV network whose commentators bring this up too much will certainly be having a league representative (informally of course) asking the network if they really want to carry NBA games in the future, given that they can’t seem to hire employees who appreciate the hard work the league puts in, and maybe the league should find someone else to show their games…
But again, I don’t think the Donaghy case does or is likely to indicate a massive conspiracy to fix games; it just shows that the league’s quality control on referees is crappy.
Yes, there are. I think there are flaws in the way the game is officiated that go beyond any one person screwing up. I see them as cultural, for lack of a better word - “it’s always been done this way,” which evolves over time into something else - and not the result of fixing or league orders for the most part. There could certainly be other fixers out there, but some people blame it all on gambling and I don’t think that’s how it works.
Everybody who follows the sport is well aware of that. Unequal enforcement of the rules isn’t the same as a conspiracy, though, and as soon as the Donaghy story broke, there were rumors it would turn into league-wide thing because it was what some people already believed.
I read where the ref scandal was a lot bigger. When Donaghy said he was doing it with other refs that should give you pause. But the game would have suffered a serious blow if it came out that many were involved. The league let out a story saying half of them were gambling but only in casinos. I am skeptical. I do see the gain for the league to sit on the info .They also gain if the public can be convinced it is no story. I believe it is a big story and a big problem.
It could just as easily be the legal tactic of the best defense being a good offense. Do your best to drag others down with you to cushion your fall, sort of like the political arena. I’ll believe it when hard evidence exists, not when a guy with a vested interest and a shady past makes a statement.
I wonder what the public reaction would be if this happened in baseball today. It all seems to have been greeted by the fanbase with a collective yawn, but in baseball pundits and hardcore fans alike would be up in arms.
Not being a fan of pro-basketball (or basketball generally), could someone explain “Jordan Rules”?
It originally referred to the Detroit Pistons’ plan for defending him, which was basically “knock him down every time he gets near the basket.” It later evolved to mean a system in which superstars get lots of favorable calls, which is how gonzomax is using it.
Jordan rules allowed him to travel. charge and get foul calls on every serious attempt. The league believes their success is due to Jordan eclipsing the game and bringing in great ratings. They have looked for a new Jordan endlessly. It makes me wonder if they really think the game can exist without favored superstars.
But when Donaghy was caught he said a lot more refs were involved. I do believe the NBA will do everything possible to suppress the information. When people say it is just a disgruntled Ref trying to take others down with him, they forget how often in other sports the truth has been bigger than first admitted. Baseball steroids crisis was originally a bunch of Canseco lies because he was not playing anymore.