Sports Biz

NBA Referee

Earlier this week, the NBA released a 116-page report it commissioned that revealed that no other NBA referee, aside from Tim Donaghy, bet on its games. The league, understanding the business impact on the sport of such accusations, undoubtedly spent a lot of money to have this done.

Releasing the report likely didn't change the opinions by the skeptical fans out there one bit. In fact, 82.6 percent of people that voted in an ESPN.com poll said they didn't believe the report that Donaghy was the only NBA referee involved in gambling.

I've read the entire report and I must say that--on the whole--I'm pretty impressed by how comprehensive it is. At the end of the day, you want to trust a report like this that gives details of the scruntized games and says that there might have, at times, been bad calls, but nothing to indicate any favoritism.

But that's me. That's not the average fan. So what could the league have done to really change opinions? The new age way to do this was to release the report, but also offer a YouTube video.

In this video, you'd have a panel of league officials reviewing the Donaghy games as well as the games of other questioned officials including Scott Foster and Dick Bavetta. On this panel, you'd also have a gambling expert. Because if there's one thing missing from this report, there's absolutely no mention of spreads.

One of the NBA's main critics, gambling expert R.J. Bell of Pregame.com, says that even though the NBA noted that it didn't find anything strange with the way Donaghy and Foster called games, the two had big line moves (swings of more than 2 points) in 13 percent of their games. The average line move, Bell claims, is about 6 percent.

Fans ultimately want to SEE that nothing happened, they don't want to be told. My take is you might as well give them what they want.

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