Are NBA Referees as Bad as They Seem?

From Dick Bavetta and Bob Delaney's famous "creative" refereeing in Game Six of the 2002 Conference Finals between the Kings and Mavericks, to Tim Donaghy's utter stupidity in betting on the sport he officiated, referees in the NBA have been a constant source of anger from fans of the sport.

However, except from counting the number of times you screamed at the television at a puzzling call against your favorite team, there has never been an analytical way of looking at the true performance of referees.

Until now.

With a new groundbreaking look into officiating in five sports, Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim presented their results using over 1.5 million plays worth of data. The NBA has reportedly done in-house studies that contradict this study, but unless the study is published, it has no credibility.

The Moskowitz and Wertheim study revealed many officiating problems in all sports, however, given the NBA's myriad problems with referees recently, that section of the study garnered the most attention. Unfortunately, the study supported many of the things fans have said criticizing NBA referees over the years.

As time winds down in games, the number of subjective calls (i.e. palming, traveling, and fouls) severely diminishes, getting especially small in overtime games. While ticky-tack calls should definitely be called less at the end of games, the huge decrease in calls made suggests that referees are too paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong call to make the right call when it is necessary.

Too many times players drive to the basket in the closing moments of a game and get hammered, only to not get a whistle.

That is not basketball.

Sure, calling little touch fouls on the perimeter or palming at the ends of games is not necessary, but if a foul at the basket is a foul five minutes into the game, it should be a foul at the end of games.

While the officials' clear inability to call obvious calls at the ends of games is a serious issue, it does not favor only one team or player. The next issue, the issue of star treatment, does. 

Star treatment has always been a constant source of whining among fans. From LeBron's traveling to Kobe always getting calls, opposing fans always have some sort of gripe. And unfortunately, the finds of this study support this assertion. 

Looking at contested loose ball fouls, the study unearthed a very unfortunate statistic. For any potential contested loose ball foul, a foul would be called 42 percent of the time if the call were against a "star," and 57 percent were the call against a "non-star."

The study defined "star" players using MVP balloting data.

However, with more digging into the subject, the study unearthed another statistic: When "stars" are in foul trouble, they have 28 percent of the loose ball foul calls against them, a sharp decrease while the percentage for "non-stars" actually increases.

I am not suggesting that the league mandates that referees stop calling fouls against stars to keep them on the court as much as possible, but just that the referees have favorite players. And while the game of basketball is arguably the toughest game to officiate in the world, the referees are at fault as well.

The officials must learn to have the guts to blow the whistle when a foul is committed at the end of a game and to stand up to prima donna star players used to getting their way or else they will never regain the credibility that they have lost over the last few years with their mishaps.