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View Full Version : Fascinating Article in the Times on NBA Officiating



dcarp23
05-01-2007, 10:10 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/sports/basketball/02refs.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp

Basically, a study done claims that black NBA players are called for fouls more frequently than their white counterparts. I'm not sure what to actually make of the numbers presented, but interesting nonetheless.

darthur
05-01-2007, 11:46 PM
A few thoughts:

1. It looks to me like the main point of the paper is: "white refs favor white players, and black refs favor black players" - not "white players are favored overall over black players", although they do allude to that as well.

2. I am not impressed by some of the comments made by the authors: for example, “Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games”. Even if you fully buy the authors have shown a correlation between skin color and winning games, they have NOT shown this. There could be a common cause (e.g., the average white player in the NBA is ever so slightly better than the average black player in the NBA). I am *not* saying that is true, but there are a number of possibilities similar to that, and regardless, such a statement is totally inappropriate for an academic paper.

3. I think the long time span used by the academic paper could be a bad thing. If you are trying to argue about what the NBA does now, data from 15 years ago is questionable at best. If, say, there are more black refs now than there was then, their main result could easily be interpreted as: "refs now favor black players more than they used to" - quite a different message.

4. Considering that the NBA has not released its internal research, I do not understand how any experts could legimately claim the academic paper is far more sound. How could they know? However:

5. While the privacy concerns that Stern mentions are legitimate ones, I doubt that's the main reason the NBA study has not been released. The NBA learns what it can about what is going on, and then quietly denies everything. They have one goal: minimize the bad publicity and then do whatever needs to be done to fix the problem (if there is one).

throatybeard
05-02-2007, 12:52 AM
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?)

Bluedog
05-02-2007, 03:09 PM
"The NBA strongly criticized the study, which was based on information from publicly available box scores, which show only the referees' names and contain no information about which official made a call."

"The study that is cited in The New York Times article is wrong," president of league and basketball operations Joel Litvin told The Associated Press on Tuesday night. "The fact is there is no evidence of racial bias in foul calls made by NBA officials and that is based on a study conducted by our experts who looked at data that was far more robust and current than the data relied upon by Professor Wolfers.

"The short of it is Wolfers and Price only looked at calls made by three-man crews. Our experts were able to analyze calls made by individual referees."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/basketball/nba/05/02/bc.bkn.refereebias.ap/index.html

Clipsfan
05-02-2007, 05:16 PM
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.

I agree that there are a lot of ways that wily refs can impact the game without it being as obvious in the box score. For instance, I know that they need to discuss controversial fouls in a debriefing after each game, but do they need to discuss why they awarded the ball to one team on a ball batted out of bounds? Do they need to discuss why they didn't call traveling at certain times? They can mix up the way they call things and get into players heads (more so in college). There are lots of things they can do to alter the flow and outcome of the game, and I agree that rarely do you hear people complaining about many of them other than fouls (and instances at the very end of games).

HK Dukie
05-02-2007, 06:13 PM
There do seem to be some process flaws with the survey. I would like to see the NBA release the official ref by ref stats though.

I'm also curious if they adjusted for playing time.

Over/Under on Malcolm Gladwell (of Blink/Tipping point) discussing this topic? I'd say two weeks tops.

ron mckernan
05-02-2007, 06:29 PM
What happens to the numbers if you exclude Rasheed Wallace? Could he be a one-man statistical wrecking crew! :)

dukeENG2003
05-02-2007, 09:30 PM
Charles Barkley on the TNT NBA broadcast said it best tonight:

"These people have too much time on their hands"

there are too many question marks about the way in which this study is conducted to believe that a 5% effect is statistically significant. As many have mentioned, the positions that white players tend to play as a factor, the fact that no accurate data as to what official truly whistled the foul was used to name two. If the effect they saw was 25%, this might be a newsworthy story, but its not, its an almost imperceptible effect found by very questionable means.

darthur
05-02-2007, 10:53 PM
its an almost imperceptible effect found by very questionable means.

I haven't looked at the study - only at the article - but I feel you are exaggerating its problems. For example, the study specifically DOES account for positions by race. And the way it deals with not knowing which ref called the foul is to compare calls by 3 black refs with calls by 3 white refs, which is fairly legitimate. Also, there is way too much data for 5% to be statistically insignificant. You could explain it by one or two bad refs or some small systematic error, or you could say it just isn't that big a deal, but it is not random chance.

I think the study has problems, but it sounds like it was very carefully done.

PS: Throaty, the article does specifically mention race too. In particular, it mentions that 15 or so players were impossible to classify as white or black. That seems too low to me, but again, this is a problem they have thought of.