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![Brooklyn Nets Head Coach Jason Kidd. Photo courtesy of www.nba.com](http://www.sunsetrising.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/JasonKidd-e1399309070133-161x300.jpg)
Brooklyn Nets Head Coach Jason Kidd. Photo courtesy of www.nba.com
For years now, the question “Is the NBA rigged?” has been on the minds of fans around the world. While it may not be staged to a point that it looks as ridiculous as the WWE, there is certainly evidence to back up such claims of corruption within the NBA. Given that it is playoff time for the NBA, conspiracy theorists will be at their most active, scrutinizing every detail of every game, looking for obvious one-sided officiating to nudge larger market teams into the next round. Fans can argue all they want that one team is just unable to get calls because of their lack of skill or experience, or chalk everything off to coincidence. However, when coincidences start to pile up like they have in recent years, they become evidence. Let’s keep in mind here that the NBA is first and foremost a business, and like any other business its primary goal is to make money. Just like Hollywood movies, the reason the NBA makes such incredible amounts of money is because people will pay to watch it, and corporations will pay a large amount of money for advertising. Especially during the playoffs.
Looking at this year’s first round, the idea of the NBA being rigged certainly calls to mind the seven game thriller series between the Toronto Raptors and the Brooklyn Nets. With the Nets being the only New York team to secure a berth in the playoffs this year, they alone represent the largest media market in the United States. Due to this, it is assumed that they have one of the highest fanbases of playoff teams, which means people will be watching their games making Nets games prime time for corporations to place advertisements. This ultimately allowed networks to sell that ad time for more money. In order to keep that money coming, it would require the team to continue moving forward in the playoffs. And how would one ensure that? Simply “persuade” the officials to call the game in favor of one team. Looking at the Toronto-Brooklyn series, it was clear that the officials were favoring Brooklyn from the start, and even more so after head coach Jason Kidd publicly criticized the officials for calling the games in favor of Toronto. This one-sided officiating was most notable in the seventh and final game of the series, when Deron Williams clearly fouled Toronto point guard Kyle Lowry. Had the foul been given to Williams, it would have been his final foul of the game, and may have given the Raptors the chance they needed to pull off the comeback win. Instead, the call was made on Kevin Garnett, who made absolutely no contact with Lowry, allowing the Nets floor general to stay in the game and prevent the Raptors from winning. There were a number of other questionable calls, and as we move into the second round of the playoffs, there may be more yet to come. With that in mind, let’s take a look back at some questionable moments in NBA history
The 1985 NBA Draft:
The 1985 NBA draft was the first draft to use a lottery system to determine who would get the first pick. While today the NBA draft lottery is conducted using ping-pong balls with a team name on it, the 1985 draft was done with envelopes containing team names in a spinning glass bowl. A video of the draft shows that there was one particular envelope that had a bent corner to identify it from among the rest of the envelopes. It was that envelope that would happen to be picked last, giving that team the first overall pick. And which team was that? None other than the New York Knicks, the team that at the time was New York’s only team, and the sole NBA representative of the United States’ largest media market. As the Knicks were struggling at that point, they were losing large amounts of potential revenue for the NBA leading Commissioner David Stern to provide them with the means to rebuild their team around eventual Hall-of-Famer Patrick Ewing, considered the best prospect in the draft.
The 2012 NBA Draft:
Despite being the worst team in the Western conference at the end of the 2011-2012 season, there were three teams in the Eastern conference with worse records than the league owned New Orleans Hornets. It is almost impossible to ignore the fact that, regardless of their record, the Hornets were owned by the NBA, and they had just traded away their best player in Chris Paul. Without him the Hornets were a shell of the team they were just a few years before, and with the loss of Paul, it seemed more than likely that fewer fans would turn out to see the games and fewer people would watch the games on TV. And what does that mean for the NBA? That’s Right! Loss of money! So once again, to prevent loss of money for a league owned team, David Stern rigged the draft to give the Hornets the first overall pick which gave them the potential superstar big-man Anthony Davis.
The Hometown Superstars:
To be fair, the Cleveland Cavaliers had an equal chance of winning the 2003 draft lottery as the Denver Nuggets. But who’s to say that the lottery wasn’t nudged in Cleveland’s direction to given them Ohio native LeBron James, who many said would be the next Michael Jordan. The 2008 draft, however, was a different story. The Chicago Bulls finished the 2008 season with a record of 33-49, putting them at eleventh place in the Eastern Conference standings. There were five teams in the West and four teams in the East that finished with worse records, for a total of nine teams with better odds of winning the draft and getting top prospect and Chicago native Derrick Rose. With odds of 1.7 percent, the Chicago Bulls pulled of the impossible and won the draft lottery, drafting Derrick Rose who would go on to win rookie of the year, MVP, and lead the Bulls to back-to-back seasons with the best record in the NBA. With odds that slim and a Chicago native with superstar potential on the line, it seems as though the Bulls had a little more than luck on their side.
The Chris Paul Veto:
This is perhaps the best example of rigging by Commissioner David Stern. In 2011, after the Miami Heat lost in their first finals appearance of the “Big Three” era to the Dallas Mavericks, the Los Angeles Lakers decided that if they wanted to win another title, they would need a similar super-team. So they made a trade, sending Pau Gasol away to the Rockets in a three team trade that sent superstar point guard Chris Paul to the Lakers… or at least, it would have had David Stern not intervened. The deal was all but done when Stern stepped in and shot it down. The Hornets, being a league owned team at the time, were losing their best player for next to nothing, while the Lakers had a chance to assemble the best team in the NBA with Paul and future Hall-of-Famer Kobe Bryant. Stern felt that it was unfair that the Hornets, clearly the worst team involved in the deal, were getting next to nothing, while the Lakers (the best team involved), got everything they wanted. As a result, the deal never happened. Just weeks later, before the start of the shortened 2011-2012 season, Chris Paul was sent to the Los Angeles Clippers to be paired with up and coming big man Blake Griffin. Given that the Heat had just lost in the finals, it seems as though Stern was trying to help LeBron avoid even more criticism on the chance that the aging Kobe Bryant might win yet another title.
Crooked Officials:
The most frequently noted form of the NBA being rigged is in the games themselves. Close games can often be decided by one or two missed calls, or in some cases, a large number of fouls are called that never actually occurred. There have been some notable examples, especially during the playoffs, where the officials are blatantly missing calls to favor the team with the larger market.
In the 2002 western conference finals, the Lakers were down 3-2 to the Sacramento Kings, and with seemingly no hope of winning game six, the officials took over. The Lakers would shoot an astounding 40 free throws that game, with 27 of them coming in the fourth quarter. In retrospect, many would agree that many of these fouls should not have been called, but the NBA wanted the Lakers to go to the finals being the larger market team. The Lakers would go on to win the championship that year.
Even some Miami Heat fans will agree that the 2012 NBA finals were rigged in favor of the Heat. After all, it would be an embarrassment to see LeBron James and his team of All-Stars fall in the NBA finals two years in a row. There were blatant missed calls, charges that should have been blocks, and an obvious lack of travelling called on LeBron (a trend which has continued ever since). The officials made sure that Kevin Durant’s Thunder had no chance against Miami, resulting in a 5-game series win for the Heat.
Evidence of NBA officials rigging the games was highly publicized when former official Tim Donaghy released a public statement claiming that the league manipulated games by telling the officials how to call the games. It is worth noting that Donaghy was caught betting on NBA games, some of which included games that he was officiating.