NBA Faces Gambling Crisis

The National Basketball Association has the worst officiating of any major sport in North America. Indeed, it’s worse there than in many amateur operations. Kobe gets three steps, the home team gets the out-of-bounds call, and technical fouls arrive at odd times to say the least. Until last week, one merely presumed a certain level of incompetence along with a desire to make the game more marketable by letting the stars get away with stuff. Now, it seems at least one referee was deliberately affecting the outcome of games because he had bet on them. This could be the worst thing to happen to pro basketball since the American Basketball Association folded.

The man in the eye of the storm is Tim Donaghy, a 40-year old who’s been a referee in the NBA for 13 years. He allegedly gambled and lost, and allegedly, he got his way out of the mess with the bookies by making calls in games that affected the final score. By allegedly altering the margin of victory, he allegedly affected not so much the outcome of the games as the outcome of the bets made on those games. If team A is supposed to beat team B by 7 and they win by one 5, nothing changes in the standings, but thousands lose their stake. Estimates are that $250 million or so gets wagered on the NBA every season so this is a big deal.

However, it raises the question of whether Mr. Donaghy is a single individual under suspicion, or whether the NBA has several referees in this position. For all anyone knows, Mr. Donaghy is innocent and the entire thing is merely bad press for the league. But for the next 20 years, everyone will wonder about every questionable call. College basketball suffered from a similar scandal in the 1950s, but then, it was players agreeing not to score so much in exchange for money. If an official is crooked, it makes things much worse.

One must make clear that there is no damage to the game, as the media are reporting. Basketball remains a thing beauty when played properly. The damage is to the business that is the NBA. There are 30 owners, 500 or so players, a few dozen officials and a myriad of support staff whose livelihoods are now on the line. Pro wrestling, which has its own troubles these days because of steroids, has proved that the public will watch a scripted, rigged event and play along with it. The entertainment value lies not in the outcome, but in the exhibition of athleticism. The NBA, though, can’t do that without serious repackaging that probably wouldn't succeed anyway.

Baseball learned this back in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which the World Series was rigged for the benefit of various gamblers by players who took money for their efforts. Pete Rose to this day suffers a lifetime ban from baseball for betting on games, for betting on his team to win. Mr. Rose believes this is unfair, but the truth is his wagers put at risk the entire business of baseball. Now, it is basketball’s turn, and it isn’t going to be pretty. The NBA already suffers from a declining fan base, a weak product compared to the Michael Jordan decade, and now this. There will be the investigations, possibly the convictions, and new efforts to polish the league's image. Yet the problem lies in getting back the trust of the fans. As any politician can attest, once lost, trust doesn’t return easily.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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