Go away, conspiracy theorists!!!

Okay, so I'm a day late on this one, but I never got around to blogging yesterday amongst a number of other tasks I had to take care of, and I just couldn't let this one go.

You hear the whispers around other sports, but no other pro sports league deals with the undercurrent suggestion that it tries to influence outcomes to the extent that the NBA does. There's a variety of reasons for that, but my opinion is that the primary reason is that they've created a very difficult game to officiate, and they don't have enough particularly good officiating. This allows inconsistencies to abound, and at critical moments.

Anyhow, it's been quite en vogue this year to suggest that the NBA is doing it's best to orchestrate a Lakers/Celtics matchup in the Finals. There's a number of reasons why that sentiment is running so strong with the conspiracy theorists. First of all, this is the first season since it was revealed that former referee Tim Donaghee was actually involved in a gambling scandal to fix games, so the league's credibility has been at the forefront all season and the idea of game fixing is much more believable to even the average fan. Secondly, the Lakers and Celtics both benefited from what have been seen as incredibly lopsided deals for star players, from teams with management that has ties to them - Jerry West and the Grizzlies shipping Pau Gasol to the Lakers, and Kevin McHale and Minnesota dumping Kevin Garnett in Boston's lap. Finally, there's simple fact of the level of appeal that glamour matchup has to the league, and if you're willing to believe the league would influence outcomes, this is clearly one that that would offer significant temptation to doing so.

Let me be clear here - despite David Stern's repeated refusal to answer the question, it's patently obvious that the league is dying for the LA/Boston matchup. The regular season sparked interest in the NBA to a level it hasn't seen in quite a while, and what better way to cap that off with a Finals matchup that would harken back to the glory days of the late 80s, matching two of the league's marquee franchises and a number of marquee stars in a renewal of a rivalry that dominated the game back when the NBA was near/at its peak.

Anyhow, the league is now 1 victory from each team away from getting its unstated, but still evident, wish. The Lakers lead their Western Conference Final 3 games to 1 over the Spurs, and the Celtics are up 3 to 2 over the Pistons in the East. And it is the last game of the Lakers/Spurs series that has the conspiracy theorists chomping at the bit. For the uninformed, the Lakers won that game by 2 points. On the last play of the game, Spur Brent Barry got the ball above the 3 point line and put a pump fake on his defender, Derek Fisher, which Fisher bit on. Fisher went airborne and came down on Barry with a significant level of contact. Barry then proceeded to continue on and attempt, and miss, a game winning 3. No foul was called despite the clear contact, and so instead of Barry going to the line with a chance to tie the game, the game ended as a Spurs loss, and the conspiracy theorists went wild.

If that was all you knew, or all of the game you watched, you might be able to buy into a conspiracy theory. However, context, and in fact immediate context, makes the idea laughable. If the refs were in LA's corner, then Derek Fisher's shot with 5.1 seconds left on the clock that hit the rim before being knocked out of bounds by the Spurs would have been ruled to have hit the rim, and the Lakers would have been inbounding with a full shot clock and up by 2, forcing the Spurs to foul. That didn't happen, and the Lakers instead had to rush a shot which they missed, given the Spurs the shot at the last possession, still down only two. If the refs were favoring LA, Lamar Odom's clean block just before that sequence would have been ruled a clean block, and not a goaltend. If the refs were helping LA's cause, Kobe Bryant, who averaged 9 free throw attempts a game in the regular season and over 13 a game in the first 2 rounds of the playoffs, wouldn't have been able to take 29 shots in the game without attempting a single free throw.

I'm obviously not a conspiracy theorist, as you can tell, but I don't totally mind this kind of talk, as long as can at least pretend to be justifiable. In this case, it just doesn't hold up, at all. If you assume a referee (and therefore a league) agenda in this game, you'd have to assume they were working for the Spurs up until the last play of the game, at which point they made an about face.

The real problem here is the combination of poor officiating and this bogus idea that the refs shouldn't "decide" the game with a foul call at crunch time. While the league has insisted for years that a foul in the first minute should be a foul in the last minute, that's clearly not the way things operate. And that's a problem, from my perspective. If you have good referees who are calling the game correctly, then the referee doesn't decide the game by calling a foul, the fouling player does by committing one. The only thing anyone should fear coming in the last minute (or at any point in the game) is an incorrect call. And yet, here we are. And because we have a media that largely doesn't appreciate context, we get talk about how the Spurs got jobbed (because their bad call was the last one, mind you, not the only one), and I have to listen to Jeff Van Gundy explain to me why it was the right call because fouls should be different in the last minute of the game. That's a joke, and that kind of attitude ensures that we're going to be having this same basic conversation pretty much every postseason. Call the game well and consistently throughout, and these problems by in large go away.