Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Could new numbers reopen NBA ref scandal?
As though the NBA didn’t have enough to worry about. On the other hand, perhaps Commissioner Stern et al should thank one
R.J. Bell of website
Pregame.com for a little detective work.
The crime Detective Bell of Vegas Yard was investigated was one of – you guessed it – changing the outcome of NBA games through play-calling. The suspect: referee Scott Foster, who is presented with some quite damning circumstantial evidence, indeed.
Last week, Bell was able to show that “big money” punters went 7-for-7 in games called by Foster. However, just yesterday Bell revealed further numbers brought to light by an unnamed NBA insider vis-à-vis the games Foster called during the 2006-07 season.
According to Bell, some ten games for which Foster refereed had betting lopsided enough on a given team to adjust the point spread by two points or more. The results? Guess what: 10-for-10, a greater than 1,000 to 1 occurrence in bookie Bell’s estimation, or to put it another way, “stats alone should not convict, but when big money bettors win 10 straight times on a supposed 50/50 event, the odds are over 99.9% against that being just a coincidence.”
Particularly illustrative in Bell’s mind was a January 12 match between the Houston Rockets and the Denver Nuggets. Any Rocket players following the line might have been surprised to see his team go from one-point favorite to three-point ‘dog by game time. The punchline: The (much better, really) Houston team won 90-86 to juuuuuuuuust cover the spread.
(Looking over
the boxscore from that game reveals a couple of other interesting facts. Despite taking 28 foul shots as compared to the Nuggets’ 17, the Rockets nearly blew the ‘spread with Foster’s help anyway, hitting just 16 from the line – “led” by Tracy McGrady’s woeful 2-of-9 – while Denver connected on 13. Shane Battier, meanwhile, led the Rockets with 25 points including 12 in the fourth quarter, his single most impressive offensive performance of the year that year; LCD wonders if he knows about Foster’s assist.)
Should you be wondering if this ties in with the biggest name in the scandal, Tim Donaghy, LCD is here to tell you, “oh yes.”
Bell found that eight of 73 games refereed by Donaghy during 2006-07 had line moves of 2 points or more of games. Combined with Foster’s ignoble 10-of-62 mark, these two zebras had large line moves in 13% of games, whereas random sampling shows that only about 6% of typical NBA games having a line move of 2 points or more. “Donaghy and Foster’s games had big line moves over double as often as a random sample of NBA games.”
Indeed, to be a bit more concrete, the 2-point swing on Bell’s games’ lines was about 270% more frequent than on the typical NBA game.
As of now, Scott Foster is still officially an NBA referee; if Bell’s numbers get a little publicity, particularly in light of revelations concerning a certain
134 telephone calls made between a Mr. Donaghy and a Mr. Foster, the whole game-fixing scandal Stern wants to shove in a closet may be oozing out again.
Well done, Mr. Bell!