NBA INSIDER: Stern did nice job; you can bet on it
KEN BERGER NEWSDAY.COM October 5, 2008
Oh, to be David Stern. The 14-month nightmare for the sports empire he has built with his bare hands comes to a merciful end, with not a stone left unturned. Yet the Tim Donaghy saga goes out with a whimper, in stark contrast to the blaring headlines and alarmist conclusions sprinkled throughout the criminal ref's legal timeline.
All the refs are crooked and mobbed up, some concluded when the story broke in July 2007. Fans and gamblers will run from the NBA as though it were a flaming asteroid. Playoff games were fixed. Star players received favorable treatment. Dick Bavetta was crooked, too - and not from a calcium deficiency - and Scott Foster must have been doing something wrong to receive all those phone calls from a felon.
All of it - every shred - was dismissed with painstaking, lawyerly detail in former federal prosecutor Lawrence Pedowitz's 116-page internal review commissioned by the NBA. And somehow it seemed like old news.
Nobody expected the NBA's own team of hired-gun attorneys to torpedo the league with an October surprise. But it is difficult to find much fault with the meticulous work Pedowitz performed and reported. The NBA, to Stern's credit, could not have been more aboveboard in how it conducted this vast, unprecedented self-examination.
Something jumped off the pages of the Pedowitz Report that nobody seemed to notice. Perhaps the single most important reform recommended by Pedowitz - and adopted by the NBA - was increased cooperation with members of the illegal gambling world.
Two days after the scandal broke in July 2007, sports handicapper Danny Sheridan told me that the NBA - unlike the NFL - had failed to develop sufficient relationships with legal and illegal bookmakers, who have the information to tip off a sports league about suspicious point-spread movements.
From the very beginning, Sheridan was wildly suspicious of the supposed widespread nature of the NBA's betting scandal. There was no way, he said, anything bigger than a garden variety betting scheme involving a few wannabes and knuckleheads could've been pulled off without the bookies - whose house money would've been in jeopardy - blowing the whistle.
Sheridan cited the NFL - the most widely bet sport - for its thorough communication with the gambling underworld, and said the NBA needed to follow its lead.
"Why the hell do they monitor the point spread?" Sheridan said. "Because they want to find out what's going on. How do they find out what's going on? They call illegal bookmakers."
And there it was Thursday - 14 months later - on page 16, footnote 24, of the Pedowitz Report:
"We have spoken to gambling experts in Las Vegas who run major sportsbooks and have contacts with bookies throughout the country. While, in their experience, rumors about manipulation of sporting events move quickly through the gambling community, they told us that they never received information supporting the conclusion that Donaghy was manipulating games."
And in his recommendations on page 6, Pedowitz wrote, "The league has arranged to obtain information on a regular basis from individuals and entities involved in the gambling business about unusual movements in the betting lines."
Stern could have solved a large part of his problem by doing that alone, but he needed to do more. He needed a sweeping review, a coup d'etats in the officiating hierarchy led by a retired U.S. Army general, and as much evidence as could be humanly collected to discredit Donaghy's claims of a widespread scandal.
Still, Stern can't guarantee another Donaghy won't infiltrate his ranks again. Even the most scrupulous review of officiating is just as imperfect as officiating itself.
The NBA invited the media to its referee camp last month, and the most profound conclusion was this: It is virtually impossible to perfectly officiate a single possession in an NBA game, much less the whole game. Calls that seemed obvious one way, even on slow-motion replay, looked entirely different from another angle or on frame-by-frame.
Simply put, the refs have an impossible job - a job that proved equally problematic for Stern and Pedowitz to investigate to everyone's satisfaction.
Adopting Sheridan's recommendation wasn't the only thing that jumped out at me. Two flaws did, too.
First, the video review of suspect games supervised by Pedowitz was performed by former director of officials Ronnie Nunn. Conspiracy theorists still have that bullet in the holster, although they've never needed much ammunition before to shoot first and ask questions later.
Then there was the most chilling line of all from Pedowitz: "The government also has declined to share any nonpublic information from its investigation with us." Is that as alarming to you as it is to me? Because once again, we don't know what we don't know.
But at some point, we have to move on. The refs will make a lot of good calls and some bad ones, and both teams will think they've been jobbed from time to time. Players will lose it and get technicals, and coaches will launch into self-serving postgame screeds about the officiating.
The focus will be back on the court, but not without a haunting reminder lurking in the back of our minds: There are no guarantees.
