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If the Ref Did It, Here's How It HappenedPlus, what the NBA should do about it.

By Robert Weintraub
Updated Monday, July 23, 2007, at 5:56 PM ET
NBA referee Tim Donaghy and Kobe Bryant. Click image to expand.

The worst job in the world this week? Pro sports commissioner. The NFL's Roger Goodell has to deal with Michael Vick and his rape stand. Bud Selig has to suffer through the Barry Bonds traveling road show. And the NBA's David Stern? He wishes that all he had to worry about was a dogfighter and a juicer.

As Sam Eifling wrote in Slate four years ago, the NBA has always provided ample fodder for conspiracy theorists. Basketball fans have long debated whether Stern fixes the results of the draft lottery from his Madison Avenue aerie, or if he hands out refereeing assignments based on which team the league wants to win. For a skeptic, that kind of talk sounds like the delusional ranting of an overinvested fan. Dark, mysterious forces control the fate of the Dallas Mavericks? Really? But last week we learned that the paranoiacs weren't completely crazy. Somebody was pulling the strings in the NBA—alas, it was a shlubby ref with a gambling problem, not David Stern.

The extent of Tim Donaghy's nefariousness will come out over the coming days. The most important questions: What games did he affect, how much money was involved—and most crucial for the league's recovery—were other referees on the take? Basketball's whirling nature, with its delicious combination of agility and contact, makes it one of the most subjective and difficult games to officiate. But there are three referees on the floor during each NBA game, not to mention an NBA department that rigorously grades each official in the league's employ. Considering all that, can a single referee, acting alone, swing a game or playoff series?

I put that question to Al Raya, who runs a training academy called the Midwest Referee School. One ref can change the outcome of a game "with any number of controversial calls," Raya says. "That makes it tough on his crew, though, and during timeouts or after the game, the other refs would definitely ask, What are you seeing that we're not?" It does seem likely that Donaghy's fellow officials had no idea about his financial problems—according to Raya, referees on the same crew aren't nearly as tight as, say, partners walking a police beat. Add in the fact that NBA crews work together for only a few games before getting regrouped, and it seems possible that a shady ref could avoid detection by his colleagues.

Even in hindsight, it's not easy to spot Donaghy's misbehavior. One game that's already come under suspicion is Game 3 of May's Suns-Spurs series, a contest that ESPN.com's Bill Simmons called "the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far." But a quick review of the malfeasance on YouTube reveals only one egregious call by Donaghy, a ridiculously late foul on a Manu Ginobili drive that he whistled from about 50 feet away. The only reason that Donaghy doesn't come off that badly is that his colleagues are just as incompetent. While it seems doubtful that the whole crew had money on the Spurs, it does make you wonder what the NBA's supervisor of officials actually does. If that kind of performance isn't enough to earn a public reprimand from the league, I'm not sure what is.

Not only did Donaghy not receive any kind of warning from the NBA, he apparently got an above-average evaluation for the season. The fact that he skated through the league's grading process seems to indicate that, rather than fix games directly, he worked the margins by shaving points on the over/under line. (The over/under is a bet on whether both teams will score more or less than a given point total. If the over/under is 200, you'll win an "over" bet if the final score is 101-100. You'll lose if the score is 100-99.) The New York Post, which broke this story Friday, has provided numbers from Stats LLC pointing to the high number of personal and technical fouls called by Donaghy's crews. And according to covers.com, which tracks referees' performances against the various spreads, gamblers betting the over on all 72 of Donaghy's games would have won 43 times. That's the third-highest number out of 60 NBA refs.

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Robert Weintraub, a freelance TV producer/writer based in Atlanta, writes about sports media for Slate.
Photograph of Kobe Bryant and Tim Donaghy by Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The reason that Vegas will never go to moneyline betting (or straight up to win betting) only, is not just because it is confusing, and it is a lot stronger than simply "they want 50/50 action".

The real reason, is that if there were only moneylines, you would see games like:

Suns -400

Hawks +350

Essentially, that means a suns bet to win $100 is risking $400, a hawks bet of $100 wins $350.

The reason the books will never go to this system, is that heavy bettors will stop betting on favorites altogether. If you can make 3 $100 bets on large underdogs, even if only one pays off, your still up $50. If 2 of 3 pay off, you would see a significant profit on a very small investment.

Vegas already takes a bath on moneylines when a heavy underdog wins (the 49ers hit +450 ML's twice last season), but if they were to go to SU (straight up) betting only, they would quickly go out of business.

--morphicresident

(To reply, click here.)

For now, it's all speculation, but it seems pretty safe to say this story is going to get worse. Uglier. Creepier.

These weren't the "legal" Vegas books that Donaghy was patronizing. The bookies he was/is connected with are affiliated with mobsters. Organized crime. The Boys. The Outfit.

And there is the real problem. Because all it takes is one bet with those guys, and they've got him by the balls. He then opens himself up to blackmail, and once that happens, the games he bet on becomes secondary. One The Boys have you, they have you for good. They could conceivably have called Donaghy a half hour before any game and told him how those games would end in relation to the spread or the over/under, regardless of whether Donaghy had a bet down or not.

What's Donaghy going to do, refuse?

On a side note, everyone is talking about calls that Donaghy made, and how they may have controlled the outcome of a game. That's not necessarily the only way Donaghy could control a game. Depending on how he bet, he could also control the spread by swallowing his whistle. He could keep the score low by not making calls, (if he'd bet the under for instance), and that's a much harder element to analyze statistically.

What's clear to me is that Tim Donaghy's actions have cast a pall of suspicion over the entire NBA. Is it possible that he's the only ref approached by The Boys? I doubt it. Perhaps he's the only one to fall into this chasm, but I have to believe that if they succeeded in buying Tim Donaghy, they must have tried to buy others. And even if nobody else got caught up in the web, why no whistle-blowers?(pardon the pun) Perhaps fear.

No matter where this rabbit hole leads, what's obvious is this. Once Tim Donaghy made his first over/under bet with criminal bookies, his presence on the court, and his whistle belonged to someone other than the league. His judgment was for the benefit of someone other than the paying fans who (to quote Jay McMullin) "thought it was all on the legit." Even in games he worked where there was no bet by him, and no orders from his new partners, the fact remains that he was bought and paid for, and everything gets tossed in the hopper of suspicion.

Whether it only happened a few times or a few dozen times doesn't matter, because the confidence of the fans, and the integrity of the league are shaken to their very foundation. People now start to wonder if what they've been seeing is real or not. And that can kill a league.

Where dirty refs are concerned, all it takes is once.

--Schmutzie

(To reply, click here.)

(7/26)

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