Jerrod Ankenman ([info]hgfalling) wrote,
@ 2008-05-16 22:42:00
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NBA playoffs
I have been watching the NBA playoffs and it is just impossible to believe that a major professional sports league, especially one that just uncovered a betting scandal, could tolerate the utter ineptness and inconsistency of its "best" officials. If aliens were trying to figure out the personal foul rules by watching tape, they would have to watch like thousands and thousands of games and still they would probably wind up with empirically derived rules that had all kinds of qualifications and randomness.

Just terrible.

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[info]jnala
2008-05-17 03:16 am UTC (link)
I was just thinking the same thing after watching the end of Celtics-Cavs. During the Kobe/Shaq Lakers years I swore off watching the NBA because the officiating made a mockery of the game; I've fallen off the wagon since, but I'm seriously considering climbing back on.

From the little I've seen this year, the calls seem more random than consistently biased in one direction; I guess that's better, kinda, but when "the officiating seems random" is putting the best possible spin on things, that's a bad sign.

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[info]gunga_galunga
2008-05-17 03:26 am UTC (link)
Do you listen to "Big Poker Sundays with Bob and Huff"? Haralabos Voulgaris is a big sports bettor (mostly NBA and Canadian Football) and on the show he said that when he heard a ref was busted for fixing games he knew it was one of two guys, and Tim Donaghy was one of them. So he thinks there's at least one more guy out there fixing games. That's not to say that whatever game you watched had anything but incompetence, but it's possible.

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[info]terrencechan
2008-05-17 05:25 am UTC (link)
I'm not saying in any way that what you're saying doesn't have validity (I haven't watched the NBA playoffs at all), but is there a major pro team sport where people don't complain about reffing? I mean, these guys really are the best in the world at what they do. At least in theory, if you put anyone else out there, they'd do a worse job. Or am I wrong?

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[info]jnala
2008-05-17 06:29 am UTC (link)
People complain about the refs in all sports, but I see a lot more discontent on the part of knowledgable observers with the NBA than with MLB or NFL.

Baseball umpires don't call a consistent strike zone, though it's gotten a lot better since the 1999 failed umpire strike and the 2001 introduction of Questec, and they're usually pretty consistent within a game. Aside from the strike zone, they do an excellent job, and I think that's widely acknowledged. Broadcast production values have gotten a lot better over the last decade, to the point where television viewers will usually get a replay at an angle that firmly establishes whether a controversial call was correct, and that replay usually confirms the umpire's call.

There are some rules of football that are a nightmarish morass of judgement calls, like holding and pass interference; but they still don't seem nearly as randomly decided as basketball fouls, and they rarely are the deciding factor in a game. I'm not sure about holding, but you could definitely determine the pass interference rules by watching tape and working backwards. Non-judgement-calls like whether someone was down or out of bounds are subject to video review, which may or may not detract from the excitement of the game by breaking the pace, but certainly does a pretty good job of getting the call right. Also, the NFL reviews controversial calls on a weekly basis and routinely acknowledges and apologizes for the ones that got blown.

NBA officiating... is just fucked. There are only three refs, they have to watch all the players, the most important classes of fouls are all judgement calls that happen in a flash and give refs no opportunity to ensure they'll have the right angle. They have to guess, and a lot of the guesses seem to just systematically go in favor of the biggest star involved in the play, or in favor of the home team, or whatever. Or they can just be called in a way that favors a certain style, which one of the teams plays and the other doesn't.

It's unclear what the NBA can do to fix this. Maybe they need a more systematic referee review process, like the NFL? Maybe they need to simplify rules about contact during shooting, as Mark Cuban has suggested? Maybe they need more refs on the floor? It's definitely a big challenge, but NBA brass seems more interested in denying the existence of a problem than in taking any steps to address it.

Basketball games typically have very tight margins of victory compared to baseball or football, so a handful of bad calls are much more likely to affect the result in basketball than in other sports. When those calls occur late in the fourth quarter and go in favor of the team that ends up winning by two... well, it's aggravating, and it's way too common.

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[info]terrencechan
2008-05-17 06:53 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I was thinking that MLB is probably the league where I hear the least ref-complaining, but I figured at least some of that was that it's the major team sport I follow the least. I was just thinking that yesterday I was on the NJ Devils newsgroup reading bout how refs in the NHL must be the worst in pro sports, is it too much to ask that they make good decisions, etc. It just seems that whatever sport people are most passionate about, that's where the refs are the worst.

Ha! I am typing this post while watching a fight in the background, and the ref completely missed a very obvious (to me) knee to the groin on the part of one of the fighters, and let the fight continue instead of calling time for the foul.

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[info]jnala
2008-05-17 07:05 am UTC (link)
I care much less about basketball than football, and less about football than baseball, so "most passionate = refs perceived worst" doesn't hold for me. But then, I'm hardly a typical fan. :)

In the wake of the Donaghy scandal, Nate Silver wrote an interesting article on Baseball Prospectus examining how difficult it'd be to fix a baseball game by bribing an ump. His conclusion was that it'd be very difficult to get enough edge to justify the cost and risk, because umpires have a lot less influence than officials in other sports.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6506

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[info]adb_jaeger
2008-05-17 12:51 pm UTC (link)
yesterday I was on the NJ Devils newsgroup reading bout how refs in the NHL must be the worst in pro sports

What galls me the most about the NHL reffing this year is the institutional change.... it's obvious that a memo came down from Bettman not to call penalties as much as was done right after the lockout (or even during the season this year).

Some games have as much holding, hooking, and cross-checking in front of the net as games from the early 1990s.

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[info]evwhore
2008-05-17 08:40 pm UTC (link)
Gary Bettman is Lucy, and the football is "the game will be called the same in the playoffs."

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[info]joepro
2008-05-18 08:31 pm UTC (link)
I don't know about the quality of the nhl officiating, but I'm a big fan of their "Toronto war room" instant replay. I think other sports, especially nfl and mlb should adopt this policy for scoring plays only, at minimum. While baseball umps are great at what they do, I have seen them rule a home run a foul ball and vice versa. As a fan watching an instant replay, knowing there is no way to reverse the call, this is infuriating.

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