Nah, thats too obvious. The real conspiracy is who the officials know. After all, they can have a DIRECT impact on games and anyone can bet on games. After that, doesn't take much imagination to figure out how an official can benefit from it. While it's fun to imagine the NBA wanting teams to win it's too much of a risk for the NBA. If people found out games were fixed the league would actually be over for a long time. Silver would be kicked out and it would take YEARS for the NBA to gain trust back. It's a lot easier for a ref to take money to fix lines and what do you know, the refs were calling fouls with 0.2 seconds left... Superstars calls are just a result of natural human bias. "Oh Lebron missed that dunk? Must have been a foul."
.. honestly .. I am far from being a sexist .. but female refs have been atrocious. The female ref in the crew that officiated one of the worst called NBA game btn the Pelicans & the Rockets, should have been kicked out after that game.
Things didn't get better after Stern's retirement. He ruined the standard of referring in favor of the big markets.
We need to eliminate those stupid bad executions or turnovers during the end of the quarters first before blaming the refs. While it's true that if the refs did a better job, we could have a couple more games in the winning columns. The refs would have no chance to take over the game if we did our part well.