Even though the Tim Donaghy scandal has not produced any evidence of widespread problems among referees, I still see it as a rare opportunity for the NBA to make some improvements in the officiating and security departments -- parts of the NBA that normally operate beyond public scrutiny, and appear to be ripe for some freshening.
Thanks in part to former referee Hue Hollins, Dave D'Alessandro of the Newark Star-Ledger gives us a peek into the hierarchy overseeing referees:
"First of all, there's incompetence from top to bottom," Hollins said. "You have Ronnie Nunn at the top, who was never a top referee, and he is not respected by any ref in the field today. From there, the referee observers in each city are not competent -- I know of one who is a high school football coach -- and some of the group supervisors were failed referees.
"Sure, we make mistakes. But when I left the league, refs were in the 96th to 97th percentile of getting calls right. But it was always the same second-guess -- by incompetent people. From a mental standpoint, it's brutal. Most guys get gun-shy and can't take it. I'm a professional referee for 27 years, and some supervisor who proved he couldn't do it is telling me how to do my job? That's like sending an auto mechanic into O.R. for heart surgery."
This kind of stuff is part of the reason that I've been calling for more transparency just about every day for a week.
Transparency is just good or business in the long term, anyway, I believe. It's embarrassing at times in the short term, but it builds all this credibility that is so unbelievably handy.
At the same time, keeping things secret that don't need to be secret creates an environment for weird things to happen. Just tell everyone they're accountable on the big stage. Most will adjust, others won't. But in the long run, everyone is encouraged to do things that they are proud of at all times.
And, if you're a great referee with a crappy supervisor, letting us see your reports will make that clear, and you'll be pracitically unfireable. But if you're getting old and starting to slip, well, that's something the public might want to see, too.
Whatever is going on, it needn't happen in the back room.
I just realized that I have been called "f---ing insane" for thinking transparency would be a good idea.
Let me explain. My call for transparency is in response to what I believe to be an outmoded business practice of the NBA: blanket denial of every single suggestion that their referees are not perfect. It's bizarre, and it has eroded all credibility in what the league office says about referees. I mean, come on, if David Stern says the referees are good, do you believe him? No! He's hot air on that topic. He's simply not believable. Referees might be good. Hell, they might be great. But it's past the time when fans will simply take his word on that topic.
Where trust is broken, you have to get down to the business of showing and not telling. I'm done taking their word for it that all referees are good. Show me.
Besides, this is the information age.
I actually don't buy that it will necessarily lead to a cacophany of complaints about referees. I think there will absolutely be a surge of that at the beginning. But once that storm passes, we'll all be permanently tired of watching unexceptional videos created by fans of every team that ever lost a game, whining about this or that referee or call. Reasonable people will learn that the vast majority of calls are good, and they we'll learn that most calls people now label terrible are in fact understandable human errors. Actual information will neuter a giant swath of the bogus referee blaming that passes as sports fandom in some circles.
And once we all get used to watching referee assessment videos, we'll start to figure out which calls are really bad. That 5% is already making headlines, so what's the difference? Now we'll just have more and better evidence.
We all get accustomed to the idea that good referees make mistakes sometimes, and the Commissioner gets to stop expending his precious credibility on the insane task of trying to convince us his workforce is better than human.
