A former referee by the name of Tim Donaghy is claiming NBA executives will instruct league officials to affect the outcome of the fifth game of the NBA Championship series between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The reason this topic is getting so much attention is the fourth game of the NBA playoffs saw an inordinate number of fouls called against the Warriors. This triggered a lot of outcry because the Warriors were ahead three games to none against the Cavaliers and many people saw these events as the league ensuring the lucrative series continued past four games.

I find myself quite ambivalent about this subject. While Donaghy was an official in the NBA he wagered on games in which he refereed and cheated in order to win the bets. I played sports all through my youth, and my heart has no room in it for cheating refs. Donaghy is a failed person. I don’t like him and I hate what he did. He betrayed the fans, the league, the players, and the other officials. If he says something I’m inclined to dismiss it out of hand.

On the other hand, I think the NBA has a strong and vested interest in the outcome of every series. There is a huge amount of money at stake. This NBA postseason in particular has not been as lucrative as it could be because the Warriors and Cavaliers won every game they played except one. Each series went only four games except one which went five. Each game generates millions of dollars in revenue. That is a lot of lost cash.

The money the networks pay to the league is recouped with advertising. There is every reason to believe the league itself, the venues, the parking garages around the stadiums, the vendors who sell product to fans, the networks, and countless others hope for a longer series.
It’s impossible to ignore these realities. The officials are well-aware the league would like the series to go on. I think Donaghy is full of himself when he claims the league will order the officials to tilt the game for the Cavaliers, but the reality is the league doesn’t have to give overt instructions. Everyone knows the outcome the league wants. And that everyone includes officials.

The league gives out assignments for the playoffs and the officials chosen for the finals make more money than those who are not. The league can easily make their desires known but they don’t have to do so overtly with specific instructions.

I’m certain Donaghy is a self-promoting jerk and his statement is opportunism at its worst. His declaration impugns the reputation of all the other officials and the league itself. However, I’m convinced the referees understand the league desires a Cavalier victory in game five. I don’t think the officials will overtly cheat but there are plenty of 50/50 calls in every game. This being the case, it’s quite possible for them to tilt the outcome slightly, although unintentionally.

The human eye sees what it wants to see, not what is really there. This is a problem in these situations. There will be calls that are incorrect and each one that goes the Cavaliers’ way invites suspicion.

What is my conclusion? Donaghy is a complete and total jerk. He is factually wrong about league executives giving explicit instructions to referees. But his overall point has merit.

What can be done about it? Nothing. It is what it is.

Tom Liberman

I wrote this blog post and it was accepted by Sport Digest but then Bill Snyder and Kansas State reversed their course and allowed Sutton to leave the school. I still think the article has some merit so I’m posting it here on my own blog anyway. Keep in mind it was written before the announcement to release Sutton from his Athletic Scholarship. Let me know what you think.

** END EDIT**

A college football player named Corey Sutton wants to leave Kansas State University but Head Coach Bill Snyder is so far not allowing it to happen. Snyder does this by refusing to release Sutton from his athletic scholarship. While Sutton is under scholarship to Kansas State, no other school can offer him financial aid. Sutton cannot afford, or claims not to be able to afford, the price of an education at another university.

Complicating this situation greatly is that Sutton tweeted some pretty nasty things about Snyder, a man who is considered by all who know him to be an outstanding human being. I don’t know much about Sutton but judging by the tweets he seems like a pretty immature young man. Reading the comments on the story it seems Snyder has a great deal of support on this, likely because of his long history of gentlemanly behavior.

I, like many commenting, would tend to give Snyder some benefit of the doubt but I’m afraid I have to side with Sutton, character flaws and all. Particularly after Snyder gave his reasons for refusing to release Sutton. Snyder basically said Sutton is a backup and Snyder can’t let all his backups leave or he won’t have any number twos. He also did something pretty despicable, he tried to justify his decision by telling everyone that Sutton failed two drug tests.

Note, Snyder didn’t tell everyone about the failed tests while Sutton was still playing for and helping the team. He only released the information after Sutton said some pretty awful things about Snyder. I get that, I understand the frustration being called horrible things can do, you want to lash out at the person so doing. But, as the old saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right. Snyder was way out of line to reveal the failed drug tests.

Snyder also made noise about not wanting to keep Sutton on the team based on the failed tests but being forced to do so by athletic department rules. If that was the case, I’d think he’d jump at the opportunity to get rid of Sutton.

In my opinion, Snyder is wrong, but within his rights, to refuse to release the scholarship. Sutton is not blameless in all of this. He should have announced his intention to depart earlier, leaving Snyder time to bestow the scholarship on a new player, a junior college transfer most likely.

Sutton seems like an immature jerk. I’m not sure why Snyder wants him on the team. Keeping him there can only be a distraction. Perhaps he merely wants to be cruel to Sutton, although this is not in keeping with Snyder’s well-known character.

Honestly, I’m really not sure what is going on. I can say with certainty that it’s a mess.

Tom Liberman

Gary Player is one of the greatest golfers in history. He’s also pretty well known as a jerk. Golf is a sport known for being incredibly strict about rules interpretations. All of these things were on display when Player ranted against a record Bernhard Langer set, or didn’t set, this weekend.

Player is upset that Langer is being credited with winning the most Majors on the Senior PGA Tour. Langer won his ninth at the Senior PGA Championship which eclipsed the eight won by Jack Nicklaus. Except, The Senior Open, the British Senior Open to most people, was not always included as a Major. Player won The Senior Open when it was not considered a Major three times. This technically brings his total of Senior Majors to nine.

The reason The Senior Open wasn’t considered a Major on the Senior Tour like it is on the PGA Tour is because it wasn’t well established in those first few years. It has since become a Major Championship.

Thus, we arrive at the situation in which we find ourselves. Player is upset he is not recognized as the all-time leader in Senior Majors. For a man with a massive ego like Player, this is intolerable. He must speak out angrily and has done so.

I think there’s an interesting reality in all of this. Player is an egomaniacal jerk which he has displayed on any number of occasions. However, in this case he has a point. The Open has been considered one of the premier tournaments in all of golf for over a hundred years. The fact that the Senior Open wasn’t considered a Major Championship during the years Player won three times seems like a rather petty distinction.

But petty distinctions are what the rules of golf are based upon. Those who interpret such rules are notorious for enforcing them to the letter. In this case Player comes out on the wrong end of that understanding. The Senior Open was not a Major Championship when he won and therefore his total wins do not take those into account. A more generous interpretation of the Senior Open wins would give Player nine wins. The fact that the Senior Open was later designated a major indicates its importance.

The end result of this little contretemps proves at least two things. Player is, as advertised, a jerk. Those who enforce the rules of golf are, as history proves, ridiculous sticklers for the letter of the law even when it subverts its intent.

I suppose it’s nice you can count on some things.

Tom Liberman

The NBA Draft Lottery is an annual event in which the fourteen teams that failed to make the playoffs in the National Basketball Association determine in which order they will draft players. In every other sports league there is no lottery, the team with the worst record drafts first and it proceeds in reverse order from there. Why does the NBA do this? Particularly with the potential for accusations of impropriety all but inevitable.

In the lottery system, the team with the worst record has a greater chance of drafting first, but an element of randomization makes it entirely likely this does not come to fruition. In fact, the team with the worst record has drafted first only seven out of thirty-three times. The team with the second worst record has drafted first four times while the team with the fifth worst record has drafted first five times.

In this year’s draft the Los Angeles Lakers ended up with the second pick, which is in line with their record for the season. Even with this statistically probable outcome, people are outraged. It is considered extremely likely the team will select a young player named Lonzo Ball. Ball is from the Los Angeles area and it was widely speculated the lottery would be rigged to have the Lakers draft second.

This is not the first time such accusations have plagued the league. The very first draft lottery was in 1985 and the New York Knicks were awarded the first choice despite finishing the previous season with the third worst record. They selected Patrick Ewing. This was widely considered to be what the NBA desired and the league has been beleaguered by insinuations of foul play in the lottery ever since.

Certainly, the days up to the lottery are filled with speculation about which team will draft where and on the day of the draft there is a special television show. This is no different than it is for the NFL and, to a lesser extent, the other professional sports leagues.

So why does the league persist with the lottery? In essence it unfairly both penalizes and rewards teams for their actual finish in the league standings. It gives rise to conspiracy theories of all kinds which the league must battle. I’m honestly not sure what is the answer.

In reality I think the entire draft is a shady process. Should not every young athlete have a chance to negotiate with any team that desires her or his service? I suppose that’s an argument for another day.

Does anyone else have a theory why the NBA uses the lottery system? It’s beyond me.

Tom Liberman

It wasn’t a sports fan. Go figure. The desire for money rather than sporting ideology drove an investor to attack the Borussia Dortmund football club’s bus as they were driving to a match with Monaco in what is called the Champion’s League.

The bomber attempted to misdirect authorities by leaving terrorist-like notes in the hopes that Islamic radicals would be implicated in the attack. Instead it was merely an investor who hoped publicly traded shares of the team would drop after he purchased a large number of options. Had the shares gone down, he would have realized a large profit.

All of this is reprehensible, but I’d like to take a moment to discuss why this sort of thing hasn’t happened to sports teams or players in the past.

Why don’t fans attack athletes of opposing teams? Why don’t they attack the team bus? Why hasn’t some crazed Chicago Cubs fan attacked players for the St. Louis Cardinals? Or vice-versa?

I’m of the opinion it’s inherent in the very nature of sport. Sport is better than religion, better than politics, better than wealth. People kill and maim each other in the name of these things all the time. But they don’t when it comes to sporting events. Yes, fans fight one another, but the athletes are left alone.

It’s no coincidence that sport is about as close to an example of a Libertarian Utopia as we have in this world. The better athlete plays. The better team wins. If you are good at kicking the ball; it doesn’t matter what you look like, what your politics, what god you worship, your gender, your age, the color of your skin, your nationality, or any of the other superficial things that falsely divide us.

I may hate the Cubs, really, when you think about it, everyone should. I certainly agonize when my beloved Cardinals lose. I rage against the other team and their misguided fans. I’m equally certain such fans feel the same way about me. But no one does the obvious and violently attacks the star players of other teams.

In an open system where everyone is allowed to compete fairly, frustration does not arrive at the fever pitch of violence. In politics, particularly in repressive regimes, there is a sense of hopelessness. In sport, anyone can win. It’s just a matter of managing your team and the game properly.

The reason the Cubs won the World Series is because they built a better team. They played better baseball. There is nothing to prevent the Cardinals from doing the same. I have no need to resort to violence.

If we had a world where the best individuals and businesses succeeded without interference, I think we’d see the same deficiency of violence prevail. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Tom Liberman

There’s a lot of uproar in baseball over an umpire named C.B. Bucknor who has a long history of making terrible calls and he hasn’t disappointed this season. What I’d like to discuss is the idea that no matter what sort of job you perform, someone is the worst at it. When is it time to give up and let go of that person?

Let’s accept the idea that Bucknor is the absolute worst at his job in the Major Leagues. Why hasn’t he been replaced? Should he be replaced?

It’s not as easy a question to answer as you might imagine. The first thing you have to evaluate is if there is someone better that can step in and do the job. This is not always apparent but must be determined. If you put someone even worse than Bucknor in his place, you certainly haven’t solved the problem.

The second question to ask yourself is what sort of potential for improvement is there with Bucknor? I think it goes without saying that someone new to a job won’t have as much skill as another person with much more experience. That someone with little training won’t do a job as well as someone who spent a lot of time practicing. We don’t want to fire people immediately without evaluating their potential.

The next thing to take into account is something called loyalty. I know that sounds strange, but it’s actually an important consideration. Has Bucknor performed better in the past? Has he been loyal to us? If the answer is yes, then it is often times a good thing to return such loyalty.

The rest of your employees will see this loyalty and return it down the road should you make a mistake. If you simply fire a loyal employee at their first mistake, future employees certainly take this into account. Would you want to work for someone who shows no loyalty? Being disloyal reduces your pool of eligible candidates.

There is also the idea of creating an environment of fear. If the league fires umpires after a few mistakes, that creates such a workplace. This not a healthy place to work. If you are afraid of making mistakes, rather than simply doing your job, you are much more likely to err.

Finally, you must consider contracts. You cannot break such binding legal documents. If the employee has a contract through their union or other agent, then you must gather the proper evidence in order to fire that person. Otherwise you risk legal issues.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Bucknor has proven his incompetence for long enough that a young umpire should be brought in as a replacement. I’m certain I don’t know all the answers to the questions I’ve posed above, but I think it’s high time Bucknor was sent on his way.

It’s easy to see an egregious error, or multiple such mistakes, and demand a firing. We sports fans are notoriously quick to call for replacements in such situations.

Before you do, just take a moment to think about all the reasons why Bucknor might still have a job.

Tom Liberman

Pittsburgh Pirate outfielder and burgeoning star Starling Marte was suspended for eighty games by Major League Baseball. As a result, we see the typical laments that always come with such revelations.

The crowd screams about what an awful human being and cheater is Marte. They fill comment posts with remarks about how he should be banned for life from baseball and how he betrayed his teammates. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, masking techniques are far ahead of detection methods. The vast majority of athletes are using performance enhancing drugs. This issue does not just encompass professional sports. There is every chance the high school track and field event you’re watching is being dominated by athletes using PEDs.

Every other player on the Pirates is fully aware Marte was using such substances because most of them are as well. So are most of the players on my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. So are most of the players on whatever professional, college, and likely high school team you follow. In addition to chemical cheating, we are now fully engaged in the era of mechanical and electronic cheating.

Cyclists have tiny motors embedded in their bikes. It is highly probably all sorts of cheating in this regard is going on that we don’t know about. Perhaps a device in a hockey goalie’s glove that tracks the moving puck and moves a few millimeters to catch it. The possibilities are as limitless as the human imagination and technology allows.

There are certainly operatives in the stands watching opponents and passing information along to allies on the bench with communication devices. Is equally undeniable that some organizations are using electronic devices to spy on opponents in the locker room as they make strategic decisions.

I’ll be honest, I suspect there is cheating going on at a grade school level with the full approval of parents and coaches. There is so much money available in professional sports it’s inconceivable to me that people are not doing so.

The advantages to be gained are both subtle and lucrative. A young athlete might gain a scholarship to a top prep school instead of a competitor. Another athlete might get a college scholarship. Perhaps another might make the major-league roster of a team rather than be mired in the minors. A coach might get a long-term contract because of a few extra wins a season based on information gleaned from a small listening device on an opponent’s bench.

At every level, there are rewards to be had for athletes and coaches who take advantage of methods we consider cheating. To live in a fantasy world where only the other team use these means, is a life of delusion.

More importantly, the methods to gain advantage whether it be PEDs, electronic surveillance, or mechanical aids, are not going away, they are multiplying. It is easier and easier to cheat and more and more difficult to catch someone using these techniques.

The final question is simply if anything can be done about it? The answer is basically no. Certainly we can take precautions. We can install anti-surveillance devices, we can test athletes for PEDs, we can use devices to look for suspicious equipment, we can apply spotters looking for spies. All these methods are quite reasonable. The reality is, cheating is here and no matter our efforts to thwart it, it will stay.

The cheaters will prosper. Those who don’t will languish. That’s an unpleasant truth.

Tom Liberman

Post Relocated to The Sporting Digest.

I did not watch the NCAA Basketball Championship game between Gonzaga and North Carolina but the articles in the various sports websites I visit seemed to indicate that the referees intruded fairly heavily. This usually means they called a lot of fouls. There are two points of view on this.

One is that officials should let the players play the game. This means not calling many fouls. The problem there is when the players realize the officials aren’t going to call anything other than obvious fouls they start to play outside the rules of the game. Things can get ugly and out of control when that happens.

A second idea is that the officials are right to make the calls and the job is difficult. This sometimes means that the flow of the game is disturbed and it is less enjoyable for the audience. The audience essentially provides all the revenue and without them there isn’t nearly as much money to be made.

Is there a solution? It’s not easy but I harken back to my days of playing sports as a lad. In street games there was no one officiating at all and even in some organized sports like the high school tennis I played, it was up to you to perform self-refereeing.

I remember those days with fondness. When we called our own games. The general idea was that if you made a bad call your opponent had the ability to do the same thing. This meant that you generally called the game fairly. If you didn’t catch the ball in baseball you said you didn’t catch it.

I understand the stakes were considerably smaller on the playground than in the NCAA Championship and the temptation to make an unfair call is significantly greater. Still, there is part of me that imagines if we remove the officials from the game, players are going to be more likely to make accurate calls on themselves. It is the presence of officials that lead to more bad calls. I remember many games where an official made a horrible call and my opponent knew it but said nothing, or vice-versa. I think that in most cases we would never have made the bad call if left to our own devices.

What do you think?

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Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Gray Horn
May 2017 Release: For the Gray

The National Football League owners just voted to allow the Oakland Raiders and owner Mark Davis to move the team to Las Vegas. I’m not surprised. There is more money to be made in Las Vegas than in Oakland in the same way there was more money to be had in Los Angeles than St. Louis.

I’m not here as a snowflake St. Louis Rams fan to condemn the greed of the NFL owners. What I want to talk about is the rule preventing league officials from entering the city of Las Vegas during the season. That’s right, prior to the move of the Raiders, league officials were not even allowed to visit Las Vegas during the season unless their regular job required it. Even then there were restrictions. Obviously this rule will have to change.

The reason for the rule was the league wanted to prevent referees from being influenced by gamblers. Well, that’s what they claim. That’s what I want to talk about. The league knows full well that gambling doesn’t happen only in Las Vegas. They know gamblers look to influence referees in every sport and in every league regardless of physical location. If they know this, why the ban?

The answer is simple and one that strikes to the very heart of problems we have in the United States and around the world. The ban of officials visiting Las Vegas gives the league the appearance of being concerned about gambling and of taking measures to prevent corruption of referees when, naturally, it does neither of those things. The league doesn’t care that the ban is stupid and useless. They care that it makes them look good. It makes it look like they are doing something about the problem. And that’s dangerous. That’s what I oppose.

I think the league has good reason to worry about gamblers corrupting their officials. I think all sports leagues have good reason to worry. The NBA certainly knows all about it. I strongly suspect any number of games in all sports, in all leagues, have been tainted by officials on the take from gamblers. Or in debt to gamblers. Or something along those lines.

I have no proof that it happens and yet I have absolutely no doubt it does. Gambling is not limited to the NFL or even professional sports leagues. Large amounts of money is wagered on high school football. Referees have enormous influence over games. They certainly give gamblers the best chance to influence outcomes. This fact has not slipped past the notice of such organizations.

I’m also not suggesting sports leagues don’t use other tactics to defeat gamblers. What I am saying is that employing useless measures to counter real threats simply for the illusion of safety is foolish. The illusion is safety is far more perilous than understanding you are in a dangerous situation. The reason being, if you understand you are in danger you take precautions. If you think you are safe, you do not.

The league is giving fans the illusion the game isn’t corrupt and therefore the fans are not necessarily looking for corruption. This means corruption can more easily occur. Now, in this case it’s gambling and some money but the same principle applies to pat-downs at the airport.

I say dispense with useless precautions designed simply to create an illusion of safety. When I see such rules in place I become concerned the people who made such rules perhaps do not understand the real threat. They might even be lulled into the same sense of complacency they hoped to foist off onto others.

We should be more concerned with passing laws that do good than passing laws that falsely make us look like we’re doing good. And if you don’t think that has correlation to what’s happening in Washington D.C., statehouses, and your local municipalities, well, you’ve been fooled.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Gray Horn
April 2017 Release: For the Gray