Is this really news from the perspective of this being shocking? The surprise is the guy was caught but it’s something that was more or less known. Tim Donoughy year ago outlined how the system in the NBA was rigged from the league indirectly/directly by the league having pregame calls with the refs to outline things to look for from particular players and teams. If the refs didn’t make those calls they wouldn’t get the playoff contracts and their evaluations would be affected. Everyone calls on line. I’m not against Bettman in any way but he cut his teeth in the NBA. What makes us think the same business practices haven’t been adopted? It may not be for the refs benefit, but rather to keep games entertaining and not so predictable by giving the crappy teams a fighting chance. I think that sucks and we see it happens.
What I would love to see are chi squared statistics on refs to see how they handle particular teams compared to the population of refs for those same teams. I’m sure you’d see some significant bias. And the data is probably out there.
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