As I was doing my reading today, I came across an excellent column by Bernie Lincicome in the Rocky Mountain News on the subject of the integrity of the NBA and what David Stern’s news conference yesterday tried to achieve. I commend this column to your reading.
The gist of Lincicome’s column is that the NBA has to do more than hold news conferences and say that this is a dark day for the league and that similar things have happened to other organizations that supposedly hire and retain people of impeccable character and trustworthiness. And, Messr. Lincicome is absolutely correct. Maybe David Stern did not say anything about what the NBA is going to do to make all of this better in the future because the FBI asked him not to do that; I can’t see why the FBI would ask such a thing, but it’s possible. Maybe David Stern did not say anything about what the NBA is going to do to make all of this better in the future because he and some trusted colleagues are in the midst of figuring all of that out but they aren’t finished yet. Or maybe David Stern did not say anything about what the NBA is going to do to make all of this better in the future because he has no idea what to do. I don’t read minds, but my guess is that the last hypothesis is the most likely one.
I got in trouble in the past for saying what I am going to say here, but it is appropriate to this situation.
Integrity is like virginity; you only get to lose it once.
Folks, the integrity of the NBA is now seriously in question. This is a league that has been having image and ratings problems in the past 5-7 years; yet the league officials – usually in the person of the Commissioner – were always aloof and unconcerned about any of them. No matter what criticism nor whatever the data, the NBA always intimated that it knew something that the public and the press didn’t know that made whatever anyone was worried about a trifling matter. That’s why I called David Stern the Viscount of Verisimilitude earlier today.
Yesterday, David Stern had to admit publicly and on tape that he had no idea any of this was going on until the FBI called him to schedule an appointment to talk to him and league officials about the investigation that the FBI had underway. Then he proceeded to say at least a half-dozen times that based on what the FBI had explained to him, Tim Donaghy was the only person associated with the NBA who might be guilty of wrongdoing. But David Stern really does not know if that is actually the case…
To use Al Gore’s recent phraseology, David Stern has to deal with “An Inconvenient Truth”. Actually, there are several related inconvenient truths here:
Truth # 1: The FBI is investigating Donaghy for activities associated with the 2005/06 season and the 2006/07 season. The NBA has been in the dark about alleged misdeeds for almost 2 years now.
Truth #2: Despite all the security procedures and all the background checks and all the monitoring processes that the NBA nominally has in place, it didn’t know that Tim Donaghy was betting on NBA games until June 20, 2007 – - unless of course David Stern lied about that fact in his news conference which would ruin his credibility related to any other part of this matter.
Truth #3: The people who are responsible for Security in the NBA – those professionals with backgrounds in the FBI and Homeland Security and police departments and DEA – failed to determine what was going on here and to warn the Commissioner that he needed to call the FBI in – not get a call from the FBI.
Truth #4: The personnel system struck out. It is supposed to monitor the performance on the job for officials and to include quality control checks and constant assessment of each referee’s performance on the court. What kind of marks would you be giving those folks today? The NBA has received questions about the way it assigns officials and rates officials over the years but has always maintained that the process was best kept in-house but that their processes were extensive and effective and efficient. Yeah, right!
Truth #5: Because David Stern does not know how all of this came about, he cannot tell the fans that this was a one-time event and that it will never happen again. He will try to do that at some later date, but it will all be smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, the NBA will most likely put in place a system to catch the next referee who tries to do exactly what Tim Donaghy is alleged to have done here. But it will not catch a future Joe Flabeetz who may try to do something equally nefarious in a totally different way and for different reasons.
David Stern surely does not want my advice on this matter but I’ll provide it anyway at no charge. One of the “buzzwords” of 2007 is “accountability” and there are lots of folks in the NBA’s security and operations and personnel hierarchies that need to be held accountable. That means the services of those folks are no longer essential to the NBA; if David Stern doesn’t make that decision and act on it, then he too may need to find other employment.
Before anyone gets the idea that I am picking on David Stern here, let me say that it was a Federal investigation that opened up the BALCO situation and brought baseball’s steroid use to light. The MLB security folks missed that one by a mile. And it was a criminal investigation – first by some seemingly less than fully competent locals and then by the DoJ – that surfaced the dogfighting activities that seem to have been ongoing on property owned by Michael Vick in Virginia. The highly acclaimed NFL Security operatives seem never to have gotten wind of that business over several years. Personnel security is a tough business but major sports in the US are also multi-billion dollar businesses and it seems as if the folks who are supposed to assure its integrity aren’t doing all that well recently.
There was a movie made about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal; it was called Eight Men Out. When they make a movie about l’affaire Donaghy, perhaps they will give it the title Over/Under. I officiated basketball for 37 years – never anywhere near the NBA level to be sure – but I do know something about officiating. It would be difficult for a single official in a three-person crew to determine the outcome of a game; it would be easier – but certainly not trivial – for a single official to assure that a team covered or did not cover a spread. I think the easiest thing for an official to do in terms of tilting the scale relative to a betting situation would be to favor the OVER in totals betting.
If an official were to call a very tight game, that would tend to get the players to back off a bit on defense – and for coaches to tell them to watch out because the official has a quick whistle tonight – meaning more open scoring opportunities. Also, a tight game tends to have more fouls meaning that scoring happens with the clock stopped and teams get into the bonus sooner. If one wanted to bias a game toward the OVER, that’s one way to do it relatively unobtrusively.
If one wanted to bias a game toward the UNDER, there might be a lot of offensive fouls called along with three-second violations and other calls to consume time without having the ball go through the basket. The problem with trying to manipulate UNDERs is that overtime is a killer here and a single official might not be able to prevent overtime.
And since I mentioned “Over/Under Wagers”, let me pose a proposition here:
Time until some blowhard Congressthing expressing outrage – I say OUTRAGE – at this assault on basketball fandom calls for Congressional hearings on the matter: 60 days.
I’ll take UNDER…
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…