On the NBA officiating thing -- there are a couple of things of interest here. I think first and foremost, the big thing is that it highlights how crappy the officiating in the league is. When you can make arguments like Sportsguy where people were so suspicious of the refs before this and that this is going to heighten that suspicion greatly now, it just means it was bad to start with. I don't believe NBA officials are on the fix, I just think they are pretty incompetent.
The bigger question from the NBA side of things is when they knew about the allegations -- one report has them being told in January that this guy was being investigated, one report has the NBA not finding out until after the season was done. Clearly if this guy was officiating playoff games while he was being investigated by the FBI and the NBA knew, that's a huge black eye for the NBA. If they didn't find out until afterwards, then I think they can surely minimize this damage.
I always like to hit the Vegas newspapers and see what the take is from the gambling community and from what I read, there isn't a lot in the trails of the lines from the games he officiated to really pin him to a lot here, which they are saying is a sign that this is likely a rogue official. Apparently most game-fixing scenarios had been rumored long before they are exposed because more and more people get involved and then the numbers start to move a ton. Apparently this guy's games never saw numbers movements more than a point or two as the money came in, which is a bit high, but still pretty common. So the take seems to be that this was a very controlled operation -- 3 or 4 guys quite possibly working with him, betting good sums of money, but not sums that were going to set off alarms, and they were able to keep it very quiet. So we'll see if that actually holds up or if there were others involved.
The one issue with NBA smugness that I have is their strange relationship with Vegas. The NBA has their all-star game there, has their summer league there and has the national team training there and they talk frequently of moving a team to Vegas. But they are the only league that does not have official relations with the casinos. This the one thing I always find funny about these people who say that sports betting should be illegal in Vegas, blah, blah, blah. Less than 1% of the money bet on sports is bet in Vegas. You get rid of it in the casinos, it's still going to continue. So when games are fixed, the only place where you might know they are fixed is in the casinos. The casinos have relations with hockey, baseball, football, college football and college basketball so that if they see suspicious activity, they alert the governing bodies so it can be investigated. But for all the ties the NBA has to Vegas, they don't have them with the casinos because they are one of the leagues saying sports betting should be taken out of the casinos (mostly to take the holier than thou stance so that if it is abolished, they could put a team there). So while in this case it sounds like there wasn't a ton in the sportsbooks that would lead them to alert the NBA, if there had been, there would have been no way to do so. So hopefully the NBA realizes from this that gambling is going to happen regardless and to embrace the watchdog function that the casinos supply.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out. If gambling and corruption among officials is indeed widespread, that's the stuff that could bring down a league. But if it's isolated, hopefully it makes Stern realize how questionable the officiating is. Part of me though does wonder what Stern is supposed to say -- the officiating sucks, but how can he say "yeah, it's not very good, we gotta fix it because it is ruining games." I think he has to toe the party line on that, although he could be much less smug about it as you point out so that it just isn't so obnoxious.
Color me as hoping Donaghy represents an isolated case but skeptical of whether that can possibly be. If he has anything to say, though, one imagines that the FBI will get him to talk simply by the pressure they can apply in terms of the penalties he'll face. Nailing members of both the mob and a high profile professional sports league has to represent the G-man's version of a perfect storm.
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