I'm posing these questions before reading the article so that I'm not doing so with my mind made up.
1) White players aren't exactly plentiful percentage-wise in the NBA anymore. Has anybody controlled for what positions guys of either ethnicity (race?) are more/less likely to play and how that might affect the likelihood of committing fouls?
2) What's a "white" player anyway? Does that mean European American? What's Nowitzki? What's Parker? What's Tim Duncan? What's Shane Battier? Hell if I know.
3) Pundits, both amateur on web and professional or thereabouts in the media, are way too focused in general on fouls. There's a heck of a lot of other stuff that basketball referees do, but all anybody wants to talk about is fouls. The practice of calling fouls in basketball reminds me of Herbert Packer's famous quip,
Crime is a sociopolitical artifact, not a natural phenomenon. We can have as much or as little crime as we please, depending on what we choose to count as criminal
...so who cares how refs call fouls by player ethnicity (race?)...unless they also care how they call the rest of the rulebook w/r/t ethnicity (race?)
Last edited by throatybeard; 05-03-2007 at 09:13 AM.
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