NBA comes face to face with credibility gap
Posted: Sunday, July 22, 2007 7:40 PM
The NBA ought to watch the daily news reports out of the Tour de France, but only if it enjoys being depressed.
There are reports on what happened. Today, for example, Michael Rasmussen, who hails from Denmark, held onto the yellow jersey after everybody rode a really long way and sweated a lot somewhere in France. But if you read the AP story, you’ll notice that it includes the usual stuff about what happened in the race, but also spends a lot of time talking about drugs and cycling.
Then check the sidebars – here’s one headlined 'Dopers on Wheels.' Here’s another about T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz and a positive drug test before the tour. Don’t forget to read about the doping accusations leveled against Rasmussen, the Tour leader.
Go ahead, rummage around our Tour de France page. You’ll find more stories about doping than you will about the race itself.
This is what happens when a sport loses credibility, as cycling has done year after year after relentless year of scandal. After a while, you can forget about restoring a good reputation; it isn’t possible. The best you can do is get people to distrust you a little less than they used to. Set small, attainable goals, like elevating your credibility above that of Congress, and work your way up.
The NBA could be headed in the same direction as cycling, thanks to revelations that veteran ref Tim Donaghy was betting on ballgames he was working. The integrity of officials has been under attack for years, often from people in the game. And now those who didn’t believe in the impartiality of the refs to begin with have all the more reason to doubt what they’re seeing.
That’s why it won’t be enough to say that it’s just one guy, and now that he’s out of commission, everything’s fine. The reason the news about Donaghy is so devastating is because it plays into all the long-established pre-conceptions.
David Stern and the league are going to have to do something drastic. It says it rates officials and reviews all the calls in all the games. But it didn’t catch bias that an academic says he found and it didn’t catch anything strange in Donaghy’s games and it didn’t notice that ref Joey Crawford may have had some problems until he had to be suspended for losing all judgment in a game and throwing out Tim Duncan
A lot of this should have been addressed long ago. It’s a tough job officiating games, but you have to be blind not to notice home-team bias and different rules for superstars – you know, the old no-call on the three-step lay-up. You have to be comatose not to ask why in some games, one team goes to the free-throw line 40 times and the other team goes 10 times.
Sometimes there are legitimate answers, but not every time.
Yet Stern has kept saying over the years that his officials are doing just swell. That sort of worked, but not entirely. Now, with Donaghy brought down, it won’t work at all.
