Is anyone on this board a referee of a sport at a decently high level? If so any insights on the culture of refereeing? Some of my friends ref part time, not at any high level or anything, but they seem to all strongly believe in giving out makeup calls and other "not exactly as written in the book" calls/noncalls despite the fact that making up calls could easily kill momentum for either team.
I can‘t really understand the meaning of this sentence"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog". Would you like to give me an explanation
As someone already posted, the Spurs do have a major star player and international appeal. Also, the league probably needed some small market teams to space out the 33 combined championships for the Lakers and Celtics.
at everyone gathering torches and pitchforks and taking Donaghy completely at his word. I disagree with leeb a lot in general, but here I think he's correct. I'm not buying it. We can whine about officiating all day along, and I won't deny that star players frequently get the benefit of the doubt, but given the difficulty of the job, you're going to have give me a truckload of evidence of corruption before I start even remotely believing in a giant conspiracy to fix every damn finals. One corrupt ref spouting vague catchphrases, probably just to sell books or gain controversy isn't even remotely close to enough. I literally want evidence that would seriously stand up under a court of law.
And since you need a mountain of evidence before you'll supposedly believe anything, you just won't believe what your eyes should have been telling you all these years. And you damn well know that Stern and the officials are pretty well insulated. They'll just keep their heads down and let this blow over. Former players and coaches on TNT and ESPN who made some good money off the league will get in front of the camera and say much of what you're saying. And the beat goes on.
Because you can't just turn teams with no talent into champs. You can extend their series, give them a hand up, keep them in the game, but if one team is dominant and the other reeks, you can't just hand over a championship. It would be just a little too obvious.
And what should my eyes have been telling me? I'm not denying there's no bad officiating, but I need a lot more than "Miami took a lot more foul shots than Dallas" in order to believe corruption, especially at the highest levels of the NBA front office. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not buying corruption until I actually see evidence that would be enough to convict Stern or the refs of corruption, and a convict's testimony and some angry fans spouting "refs should have called this play and not that play" is not even remotely enough.
I think not catering to big market teams or star players is why the NFL as a whole has been more successful. Every team has a chance except the Lions. People watched the NFL even with the scab players. Parity is good for the game.
I don't think the claim is that every result of every game is fixed. The claim is, refs make strong influences on games, and there are patterns of these influences towards certain teams and certain players. In other words, what the officiating does, according to this theory, is just some nudges to skew the odds. You can't discern a whole lot of "evidence" other than some "bad calls" by watching just one game, or even one series. But over a large amount of games, the odds will show its patterns. I am not sure how I take this theory. It sounds reasonable enough. However, there are just too many anomalies. The most glaring anomaly to me is not the Spurs. It is Yao Ming and the Rockets. They have tons of reasons to hope Yao's team to be successful from a business standpoint.
Until all players, from Lebron/Kobe to rookies, are given the same chance and same calls, I will continue to say the NBA is rigged.. I don't care what anyone else thinks...
NBA obviously doesn't want a finding that Donaghy fixed the game because that would seriously undermine its integrity. Oddly the FBI chief on the case is the head of Gambino task force. I don't think he has much interest in pinning down Donaghy. He got to Donaghy to pin the other two mafia guys, that's my intuition. Donaghy ratted the mafia out to FBI, so the FBI is protective about him. Between Donaghy and NBA, Stern basically didn't want anything to do with Doanghy, but then this Donaghy publishes a book ...
From a business standpoint, yes it's the ideal choice to have Yao succeed. On the other hand, you need to consider all the other factors. Players like Kobe, Lebron and Wade get their attention from ALL over the world. Yao's focus is mainly in Houston and China. Racism exists everywhere, even amongst referees. Remember an investigation not too long ago that concluded white referees tend to call more fouls on blacks and blacks tend to call more fouls on whites? Yao is neither, and as we can see in games last year like the Cavs, Yao can get abused in every way possible but they will not call it. A Chinese winning in America. That is a huge statement to the world. America and China are the competing powers in this world. If Yao wins, it means Yao is better than all the other superstars out there. Obviously, if the NBA is indeed rigged, there is no doubt in my mind that it may be related to the Mob as well. They may not be interested in allowing Chinese people to win in America.
Magic Johnson was just being interviewed on ESPN. When asked about the referee situation in the NBA (correlation to Donaghy's interview), he basically called bull**** on what Donaghy was saying. But I'm sure he's Stern's pet... his response seemed a little shaky.
