Reasons why the NBA is not rigged

[Sedale Threatt]

Now you can believe that he is a liar, but you need to understand the immense amount of pressure on him to tell the truth and the amount of verification of what he said that was done and reported on by the FBI.

Do you imagine that the FBI followed up on everything Donaghy told them, and would have pursued matters further if it had found anything remotely approaching league attempts to "play in its own game"?

Because that's the heart of the matter.

I don't think anybody disputes that Donaghy did the things he copped to while officiating, or that he's undeniably a black eye on the NBA. But his actions wouldn't seem to have nearly the scope many assume given the fact that nothing further came out. Nor does it mean anything that he pops his head up to accuse the league of evil doing whenever there's an officiating controversy.

At this point, that's pretty much a given.

[Thugger HBC]

I tend to prefer the term "scripted".

[Quotatious]

Even if all of that stuff Donaghy said was true, there's only so much you could possibly do to influence outcomes of games. A lot of times, one team is just so dominant that it's impossible to prevent them from winning by making questionable calls - for example - hypothetically, refs could make all the calls in favor of the Heat and they still wouldn't beat the Spurs in 2014 finals, because other than one game that Miami won, San Antonio didn't leave anything in doubt in the remaining games. They pretty much destroyed the Heat in the remaining four games, winning all of them by 15 points or more. In a situation like that, there's pretty much nothing you can do as a ref, no matter how much you wanted to skew the results.

[snaquille oatmeal]

when new markets reach the finals they act like they never heard the words "home Cooking"
but that's none of my business

[Rich Rane]

Why is the NBA not rigged? The integrity of the game. Hey wait, why are you all walking away?

[jimross]

The NBA had over 5 billion in revenue last year...no way they risk tarnishing reputation of the league for an extra 10 million in revenue.
In the past 28 years there have only been 5 NBA Finals that went to a game 7. This idea that the league is deliberately extending series to 7 games for extra revenue is absurd.

Do you think if it was the Warriors who were down 3-1 that Green would have still been suspended?

If it was LeBron in Greens position do you think he would have been suspended in for game 5?

Why wasnt Green suspended given a 1 game suspension when the Warriors were down vs the OKC Thunder when Green clearly hit Adams for a 2nd straight game?

Then you have the Kings & Lakers game 6 and Heat & Mavs (1) plus a whole host of other games.

I don't know if the leauge is rigged but they defienlty seem to make biased decisions when it helps them bring in $$. You can almost bet on what team will get the benefit of the calls based on how it benefits the leauge. Was anyone really surprised that Curry picked up some cheap fouls in game 6?

[jimross]

I don't understand why more people have not taken the time to actually understand what happened with Tim Donaghy. Even after all this time most posters seem totally ignorant of the facts and write him off as a crooked liar whose actions are total outliers. But if you are going to talk about the integrity of the league you need to understand what happened with him, so I will break it down for you:

- Tim Donaghy liked to bet on NBA games (like a lot of players, probably like some refs; and of course wrong and illegal)
- As he was illegally laying bets, the mob discovered him to be an NBA ref and aggressively blackmailed him into giving them tips about who to favor in specific games, including - but not limited to - ones he reffed himself
- the FBI was tapping the mob's phones and discovered Donaghy feeding them info by accident

now here are the 2 most important facts about Donaghy:

1. the FBI has confirmed on 60 Minutes that Donaghy had a 75% success rate against the spread picking winners in games he did not referee

To pick 75% against the spread is absolutely unheard of and statistically impossible unless:

a) Donaghy was colluding with other refs to fix games he was not reffing (there is no evidence whatsoever that this happened except perhaps the hundreds of phone calls to Scott Foster just before games and their meaning as discussed here http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/07/14/disgraced-former-nba-referee-tim-donaghy-phone-calls-to-second-ref-raise.html) or
b) his knowledge of the internal directives, feuds and refereeing assignments gave him such a clear insight into who was going to win that he could get it right against the spread 75% of the time

The second one is the one Donaghy affirms happened and which he has talked about in great detail in terms of the how and who and why, with a clear and explicit awareness of the direct hand of the NBA in shaping the conditions and internal politics that led him to be able to pick winners against the spread so accurately

2. Donaghy agreed to a plea bargain with the FBI that required him to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about everything that he did. He took the deal to avoid a 25 year jail term knowing that if he lied or omitted anything he would spend most of his life in jail as a result. Not only that he knew they had many hours of wiretapped recordings of him and there was no way to wiggle out of it.

Now you can believe that he is a liar, but you need to understand the immense amount of pressure on him to tell the truth and the amount of verification of what he said that was done and reported on by the FBI.

You can interpret the above however you like, but personally I believe the NBA knows as well as Donaghy did the impact of their refereeing assignments and directives, and that sometimes it assigns and guides referees for strategic purposes to enhance the league's competitiveness, increase the brand power of stars and generally build a more profitable business.

I'm a big fan of the game but I think to pretend this is not how things work is to be naive. I think the players know it and everyone in the league knows it. Sometimes to win your biggest challenge is changing the narrative so that now it is working in your favour.

Anyway, this is not to say every game or series is rigged, not at all. Definitely not. But in various ways is the NBA a player in its own game? Absolutely.

This pretty much ends this thread. To hit 75% of your bets is ridiculous. Hitting 60% is considered the upper echelon of gambling. Somebody is obviously influencing the game for him to be able to hit that much.

[DarkAzcura]

The NBA had over 5 billion in revenue last year...no way they risk tarnishing reputation of the league for an extra 10 million in revenue.
In the past 28 years there have only been 5 NBA Finals that went to a game 7. This idea that the league is deliberately extending series to 7 games for extra revenue is absurd.

Do you think if it was the Warriors who were down 3-1 that Green would have still been suspended?

If it was LeBron in Greens position do you think he would have been suspended in for game 5?

Why wasnt Green suspended given a 1 game suspension when the Warriors were down vs the OKC Thunder when Green clearly hit Adams for a 2nd straight game?

Then you have the Kings & Lakers game 6 and Heat & Mavs (1) plus a whole host of other games.

I don't know if the leauge is rigged but they defienlty seem to make biased decisions when it helps them bring in $$. You can almost bet on what team will get the benefit of the calls based on how it benefits the leauge. Was anyone really surprised that Curry picked up some cheap fouls in game 6?

It's kind of amazing that some still don't understand why Green was suspended. He was suspended for accumulating flagrant fouls throughout the playoffs. That should automatically answer most of your questions. Yes, if the Warriors were down 3-1, he would still be suspended. Yes, if Lebron had reached the flagrant foul limit, he would be suspended. Green wasn't suspended for the singular action. It was an accumulation.

[jimross]

The NBA had over 5 billion in revenue last year...no way they risk tarnishing reputation of the league for an extra 10 million in revenue.
In the past 28 years there have only been 5 NBA Finals that went to a game 7. This idea that the league is deliberately extending series to 7 games for extra revenue is absurd.

Do you think if it was the Warriors who were down 3-1 that Green would have still been suspended?

If it was LeBron in Greens position do you think he would have been suspended in for game 5?

Why wasnt Green suspended given a 1 game suspension when the Warriors were down vs the OKC Thunder when Green clearly hit Adams for a 2nd straight game?

Then you have the Kings & Lakers game 6 and Heat & Mavs (1) plus a whole host of other games.

I don't know if the leauge is rigged but they defienlty seem to make biased decisions when it helps them bring in $$. You can almost bet on what team will get the benefit of the calls based on how it benefits the leauge. Was anyone really surprised that Curry picked up some cheap fouls in game 6?

It's kind of amazing that some still don't understand why Green was suspended. He was suspended for accumulating flagrant fouls throughout the playoffs. That should automatically answer most of your questions. Yes, if the Warriors were down 3-1, he would still be suspended. Yes, if Lebron had reached the flagrant foul limit, he would be suspended. Green wasn't suspended for the singular action. It was an accumulation.

Yes I understand that. What I mean by suspending was the upgrading of the foul to a flagrant. And no it doesn't answer my question because the leauge in my opinion wouldn't have upgraded the fouls knowing it would end up in a suspension in any of those scenarios.

[jbk1234]

I don't understand why more people have not taken the time to actually understand what happened with Tim Donaghy. Even after all this time most posters seem totally ignorant of the facts and write him off as a crooked liar whose actions are total outliers. But if you are going to talk about the integrity of the league you need to understand what happened with him, so I will break it down for you:

- Tim Donaghy liked to bet on NBA games (like a lot of players, probably like some refs; and of course wrong and illegal)
- As he was illegally laying bets, the mob discovered him to be an NBA ref and aggressively blackmailed him into giving them tips about who to favor in specific games, including - but not limited to - ones he reffed himself
- the FBI was tapping the mob's phones and discovered Donaghy feeding them info by accident

now here are the 2 most important facts about Donaghy:

1. the FBI has confirmed on 60 Minutes that Donaghy had a 75% success rate against the spread picking winners in games he did not referee

To pick 75% against the spread is absolutely unheard of and statistically impossible unless:

a) Donaghy was colluding with other refs to fix games he was not reffing (there is no evidence whatsoever that this happened except perhaps the hundreds of phone calls to Scott Foster just before games and their meaning as discussed here http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/07/14/disgraced-former-nba-referee-tim-donaghy-phone-calls-to-second-ref-raise.html) or
b) his knowledge of the internal directives, feuds and refereeing assignments gave him such a clear insight into who was going to win that he could get it right against the spread 75% of the time

The second one is the one Donaghy affirms happened and which he has talked about in great detail in terms of the how and who and why, with a clear and explicit awareness of the direct hand of the NBA in shaping the conditions and internal politics that led him to be able to pick winners against the spread so accurately

2. Donaghy agreed to a plea bargain with the FBI that required him to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about everything that he did. He took the deal to avoid a 25 year jail term knowing that if he lied or omitted anything he would spend most of his life in jail as a result. Not only that he knew they had many hours of wiretapped recordings of him and there was no way to wiggle out of it.

Now you can believe that he is a liar, but you need to understand the immense amount of pressure on him to tell the truth and the amount of verification of what he said that was done and reported on by the FBI.

You can interpret the above however you like, but personally I believe the NBA knows as well as Donaghy did the impact of their refereeing assignments and directives, and that sometimes it assigns and guides referees for strategic purposes to enhance the league's competitiveness, increase the brand power of stars and generally build a more profitable business.

I'm a big fan of the game but I think to pretend this is not how things work is to be naive. I think the players know it and everyone in the league knows it. Sometimes to win your biggest challenge is changing the narrative so that now it is working in your favour.

Anyway, this is not to say every game or series is rigged, not at all. Definitely not. But in various ways is the NBA a player in its own game? Absolutely.

This pretty much ends this thread. To hit 75% of your bets is ridiculous. Hitting 60% is considered the upper echelon of gambling. Somebody is obviously influencing the game for him to be able to hit that much.

It's statistically unlikely over a large sample size, but I'd like to know what sample size we are talking about. If everyone left Vegas a loser, no one would go. But people win and sometimes they win big. The house makes its money because the odds are in their favor, and given enough people and enough bets, the results will be what they're suppose to be.

[DarkAzcura]

Do you think if it was the Warriors who were down 3-1 that Green would have still been suspended?

If it was LeBron in Greens position do you think he would have been suspended in for game 5?

Why wasnt Green suspended given a 1 game suspension when the Warriors were down vs the OKC Thunder when Green clearly hit Adams for a 2nd straight game?

Then you have the Kings & Lakers game 6 and Heat & Mavs (1) plus a whole host of other games.

I don't know if the leauge is rigged but they defienlty seem to make biased decisions when it helps them bring in $$. You can almost bet on what team will get the benefit of the calls based on how it benefits the leauge. Was anyone really surprised that Curry picked up some cheap fouls in game 6?

It's kind of amazing that some still don't understand why Green was suspended. He was suspended for accumulating flagrant fouls throughout the playoffs. That should automatically answer most of your questions. Yes, if the Warriors were down 3-1, he would still be suspended. Yes, if Lebron had reached the flagrant foul limit, he would be suspended. Green wasn't suspended for the singular action. It was an accumulation.

Yes I understand that. What I mean by suspending was the upgrading of the foul to a flagrant. And no it doesn't answer my question because the leauge in my opinion wouldn't have upgraded the fouls knowing it would end up in a suspension in any of those scenarios.

You are gonna get upgraded to a flagrant if you punch someone in the balls. It doesn't matter who it is.

[Sedale Threatt]

This pretty much ends this thread.

How? Nobody disputes Donaghy gambled.

[sendai91]

If the NBA were rigged or scripted, I don't think these outcomes fit the narrative:

The San Antonio TV market has won 5 NBA finals since 1999. The NY market has made one ( two if you count the Nets) and lost them both. Neither NYC franchise has won a title in over 40 years.

This years title contestants are from Oakland and Cleveland. Those two cities are not entertainment meccas or huge TV markets. the 4th largest TV market (Philly) has been in nuclear winter mode for the last several years.

The best 2 players in the NBA are in teams in Oakland and Cleveland. Have any of you been to those cities? Why on earth if the NBA is scripting / steering outcomes would you allow your best players to play there?

Among the next best players are representatives from Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Portland and Indiana, Toronto or Houston, maybe.

The teams most likely to establish conference final level franchises in the next 5 years are in some order - Minnesota, Orlando, Boston-maybe, Milwaukee and Utah.

I suppose the Clippers have a couple of top-20 players, but the Lakers, Knicks and Bulls are in really rough shape in aggregate.

Now, if you're saying that the NBA is rigged or scripted, and also they're doing a really stupid job of scripting outcomes, that's a different story together. I'd be more likely to accept that the NBA is trying to script outcomes and largely failing at it then a blanket statement that there's a fix in throughout the league.

[taikibansei]

now here are the 2 most important facts about Donaghy:

1. the FBI has confirmed on 60 Minutes that Donaghy had a 75% success rate against the spread picking winners in games he did not referee

To pick 75% against the spread is absolutely unheard of and statistically impossible unless:

No. The FBI confirmed only that Donaghy had a 75% success rate against the spread. Donaghy himself confirms this here:

He told Simon he bet on "probably over 100 games," reffing a lot of those himself.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-nba-ref-tim-donaghys-personal-foul/

The New York Times mentions this as well:

According to a person directly involved with the case, it involves no other N.B.A. official and it is focusing on whether Donaghy affected the margin of victory in about 10 or 15 games of the 60 he officiated since December 2006.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/sports/basketball/21referee.html?_r=2&ref=sports&oref=slogin

I.e., nowhere have I seen a breakdown on winning percentages for just games not reffed by Donaghy. (It also does not appear to be clear how many games he bet on total.) On the other hand, here's yet another article discussing peculiarities that continually showed up in games reffed by Donaghy:

In the two seasons in which the FBI is investigating Donaghy for allegedly fixing games for gambling purposes, Bell found that, in games when Donaghy was part of the officiating crew, NBA teams scored more points than Las Vegas expected (hitting the over) 57 percent of the time. With a league average of 49 to 51 percent, the odds of such an occurrence are 19 to 1. When Bell analyzed the numbers from the two seasons before the two in question, he discovered that, in games Donaghy officiated, NBA teams scored more points than Vegas expected just 44 percent of the time. Although the 13 percent difference might not seem that jarring to the casual observer, it's jaw-dropping in the world of sports gambling. Bell said the odds of a 44 percent probability happening 57 percent of the time are about 1 in 1,000.

"There's a 99.9 percent chance that these results would not have happened without an outside factor," Bell said. "Something abnormal was going on here." ESPN.com's own research into Donaghy's last two seasons supports Bell's claims. In the 66 games Donaghy refereed in the 2005-06 season, the two teams in his games combined to score an average of 196.8 points. The average over/under, according to BoDog.com, was 186.6, a difference of almost 10 points.

http://pregame.com/pregame_blogs/b/rj-bell/archive/2007/09/13/july-24-2007-numbers-indicate-unlikely-outcomes-in-games-donaghy-officiated.aspx

However, even with all this data, it could not be absolutely proven that Donaghy fixed those games. That said, I've already posted multiple links to multiple articles where Donaghy's assertions about supposed "tendencies" have been thoroughly analyzed...and found false. Here's another:

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/11341/tim-donaghys-tale-of-dick-bavetta

And another:

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/11340/tim-donaghys-claims-on-trial

His assertions don't add up. Given all this, I wouldn't trust Donaghy with taking out my garbage.

Could referees sometimes be influencing outcomes? Sure. Basketball is filled with judgement calls, and the refs are human beings. Right or wrong, I think some referees react to home crowds differently and/or take player comments personally. Some may be starstruck and favor the superstars, and others may even hold grudges (though every grudge identified by Donaghy has been proven to be unsupported statistically). This was one reason why, when I played high school and college ball, the coaches always told us to reach out to the refs and treat them with respect.

However, this is all a far cry from the NBA "rigging" games.

[Edrees]

Even if all of that stuff Donaghy said was true, there's only so much you could possibly do to influence outcomes of games. A lot of times, one team is just so dominant that it's impossible to prevent them from winning by making questionable calls - for example - hypothetically, refs could make all the calls in favor of the Heat and they still wouldn't beat the Spurs in 2014 finals, because other than one game that Miami won, San Antonio didn't leave anything in doubt in the remaining games. They pretty much destroyed the Heat in the remaining four games, winning all of them by 15 points or more. In a situation like that, there's pretty much nothing you can do as a ref, no matter how much you wanted to skew the results.

All you need are 4 bad calls to completely change game, just do it on the teams best player to take him out of the game. He'll nturally commit 2-3 other regular fouls

[Dominator83]

Its not rigged because you can't make 3's go in for 1 team, and go out for another

[Vandal Savage]

Its not rigged because you can't make 3's go in for 1 team, and go out for another

You can.

[Dominator83]

Its not rigged because you can't make 3's go in for 1 team, and go out for another

You can.

Right