NBA scandal: Referee who fixed games goes rogue. Will anyone care?

If the other shoe drops in the NBA refereeing scandal, does it make a sound for the league’s fans to hear?

Deadspin.com has excerpts from Tim Donaghy’s upcoming book about the unseemly culture he claims exists among those who officiate the NBA’s games.

Donaghy, for those who have already forgotten, went to prison for several months after the feds popped him in 2007 for fixing NBA games, which he admitted to later on. Perhaps the most attention this story received was the cottage industry it formed among armchair Internet investigators who concluded that Donaghy did indeed manipulate the outcomes to important basketball games to stuff the face of his ravenous gambling addiction.

Particularly scorned were Phoenix Suns fans who felt that Donaghy himself thwarted the team’s run at a 2007 championship. The NBA’s public relations response did a masterful job of painting a lone wolf portrait of Donaghy, which hung prominently from the walls of the ensuing media coverage. Not that it mattered much — 11 days after the New York Post originally ran with the opening whiffs of the Donaghy scandal, star Kevin Garnett got traded from the Minnesota Timberwolves to the Boston Celtics. The sports media was sufficiently distracted to the point that most everyone seemed to forget about the lone gunman who fired shots at the NBA’s reputation.

Take a look at Donaghy’s own words, after the jump.

If Donaghy can get his book past the risk management and litigation departments of leading publishing houses, this is what readers can expect to learn:

• Referees made side bets before games to drop technical fouls on players or on who could hold off the longest before calling the first foul of the game. “It didn’t matter if bodies were flying all over the place; no fouls were called because nobody wanted to lose the bet.” Spoils of victory included having the losing ref pick up the tab for dinner to wiggling out of having to tip the ball boy.
• Referees would make calls in favor of marquee players, particularly if players like Kobe Bryant were matched up against players who committed ratings-adverse tactics like playing defense. “Basketball purists like to see good defense, but the NBA wants the big players to score big points.”
• Other referees — not just Donaghy — openly approached important games with the understanding of which team needed to win in order to suit the NBA’s interests. “[Dick] Bavetta went on to inform me that it wasn’t the first time the NBA assigned him to a game for a specific purpose. He cited specific examples, including the 1993 playoff series when he put New Jersey guard Drazen Petrovic on the bench with quick fouls to help Cleveland beat the Nets.”

Donaghy goes on and on. What he says is not all that surprising. What is surprising is how little traction his allegations have gained. Like a Ron Paul or a Dennis Kucinich, Donaghy appears to have been fitted for a top-of-the-line tinfoil Stetson.

Sports seem to be the last remaining bastion of the public’s credulity. Many Americans seem to accept the cynical view that politics and big business have been corrupted by all the money and influence involved. But professional sports seem to get a pass in this respect. With all the money up for grabs in professional and college sports — ticket prices, gambling debts, television contracts, real estate transactions, salaries and so on — why not examine harder the possibility of serious corruption and wrongdoing in the ranks of athletics? There are too many people with too deep of pockets to fill to risk having games play out on the field, court or ice unfettered. Or so it at least seems this way.

Of course, sports organizations have done a fine job of inoculating themselves against these types of questions. Those within the sport who raise the specter of cheating or at least poor officiating can look forward to finding a fine from the league in their mail. Those outside the sport — namely the media covering these organizations — have their access in the future to worry about. Refereeing in sports have long been like the judiciary in government —mostly off limits to examination by the media. When was the last time a referee appeared before a press conference to explain their decisions?

In the end, Donaghy’s book will likely provide only grim satisfaction for Suns fans who still burn at the prospect of having a championship season stolen from them before that franchise’s management dismantled the foundation of a once-solid team. But after yet another NBA investigation assures its fans that Donaghy did indeed act on his own, Donaghy and his book will fade into the vague memory of sports ignominy with its other mostly-forgotten outcasts in Stevin Smith, Dewey Williams and Southern Methodist University football.