WE WUZ ROBBED

 

               The National Basketball Association’s seemingly endless playoff schedule starts today (April 15), made longer by the new play-in sked that began last Tuesday (4/11), but one of the game’s dominant themes already is reverberating through the land.  It’s the “We Wuz Robbed” cry from fans who think their teams have been or will be victimized by referee unfairness.

               It’s a claim that follows all sports, probably out of the ingrown touch of paranoia we all harbor, but none more so among our American Big Three than basketball. My hometown Phoenix Suns have been especially irate of late, citing a 21-25 per-game free-throw-attempt deficit during the regular season as prima facie proof of evil doings. If it’s occurred to them and their fans that, maybe, the Suns just foul more than foes, they’ve kept it to themselves.

                The hoops sport is singled out because its refs have more to do with the outcome of its games than most others. The on-court banging around that characterizes the NBA—and is celebrated by the league’s boosters-- is so pervasive that fouls might be called on just about every play.  As it is, NBA refs call 48 personal fouls in an average game. That compares with the average of 12 penalty mark-offs a game in the National Football League, a total that in itself stirs anger.

               The notion that game officials or the league itself favors some teams at the expense of others also is strongest in the NBA.  The model favored team is, of course, the New York Knicks, probably because of general hinterland bias against the metropolis, but also because of the 1985 draft-lottery drawing that gave the Knicks the right to acquire giant center Patrick Ewing, that year’s prize. Anti-Knick vibes have waned in recent decades, probably because the perceived favoritism hasn’t brought the poor guys a title since 1973. Now, I guess, the LA Lakers, from the West Coast metropolis, are said to be the pets.

               Anyone who’s been close to sports knows that the whole idea of organized official bias is ludicrous. I’ve known refs or umps professionally or personally (my nephew David Trachtenberg calls high-school basketball and volleyball games in the Denver area), and can say unreservedly that no other group matches them for pure-hearted devotion to their sports. Big-league game officials today make good money—NBA refs top out at $550,000 a year and MLB umps at $450,000—but just about all of them started out officiating kids’ games at $50 a pop, and that rate or close to it still prevails in the playgrounds. Without such heroes organized sports in this country wouldn’t exist.

               This is not to say that there is no such thing as official bias. It exists, but perhaps not in ways, or for reasons, some might expect. For these I refer to the book “Scorecasting,” by Tobias J. Moskowitz, a professor of finance at Yale U., and L. Jon Wertheimer, an editor at Sports Illustrated magazine. It took a statistical look at some of sports’ popular verities and debunked more than a few of them.

Published in 2011, the book is a dozen years old and some things have changed in that span, but because it draws on mountains of data that aren’t easily moved, its main conclusions remain valid. One, for example, showed that the NFL practice of “icing” placekickers by calling last-second timeouts doesn’t work— success rates with and without them were almost identical. Another showed that NFL teams that “went for it” on fourth down anywhere near the 50-year-line did better than ones that made the conventional choice of punting. A third questioned the widespread practice of removing from NBA games players with five (of the permitted six) fouls with considerable game-time left. Those guys foul out so infrequently (about 20% of the time) that it’s better to keep their production by letting them play.

The book’s most interesting conclusions have to do with home-field advantage; that’s one of the enduring truths of all team sports, with home edges of 55% to 60% across leagues since time immemorial. I’ll spare you from reading, and myself from presenting, most of the stats, but using clever measures it eliminated as causes such factors as home-field familiarity, home comforts and visitors’ travel weariness. What it found, regardless of nation, sport or decade, was official bias in favor of home teams.

The difference was strongest in low-score soccer, where European-league home teams win or tie about 60% of the time. Data dating from the 1800s showed that soccer refs consistently give home teams edges in extra time, red cards and penalty kicks, things that often are decisive in one-goal outcomes. In baseball, millions of MLB data bits collected electronically for more than 20 years show that ball-strike calls favor home teams. In basketball the homers get the breaks on not only personal-foul calls but also on ones involving ball-possession changes. The differences are small, usually amounting to just a few percentages, but you can drown in a lake that averages a foot deep.

The authors assert, convincingly, that the reasons behind the discrepancies have nothing to do with conscious bias. One is the all-sports dictum—real although unspoken—that the players should decide the games; for that reason, they say, umps are especially hesitant to make “ball four” or “strike three” calls on close pitches, and penalty frequency in all sports declines late in close-fought contests and in playoffs. Another is the tendency toward conformity found in all human groups, mirroring people’s psychological desire to be agreeable to those around them. Thus, the home-field edge grows with crowd size and the nearness of the crowds to the playing fields.

For more (and there’s a lot more) you gotta see the book. It’s not light reading, but it’s worth the effort for serious fans. It’s available on Amazon for $17, plus delivery.  And no, I’m not up for a slice.

 

              

              

BETTERBALL

 

               To say that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been upsetting is to say the least. A No. 16-seeded team beat a No. 1, a No. 15 beat a 2. All four regional top seeds didn’t make it to the round of eight. Kentucky, Duke and Kansas were out by the Sweet Sixteen, Florida Atlantic, Creighton and San Diego State were in. What in the world was going on?

               The TV commentators and sports-blab radio hosts were full of complicated answers, of course, but a simple one should suffice. It’s that lots of good young basketball players are around these days, lots and lots. Too many to man merely the game’s traditional blue-blood college teams and conferences, for sure.  In case you haven’t noticed, or even if you’d only sensed it, basketball has become our best-played team sport, by a mile.

               Not only are there more good teams than there used to be, but the players also are better individually, also by a mile. I wasn’t much of a basketballer myself—the playground on which I grew up had hoops but was covered in gravel, and you can’t really play basketball on that stuff. But my first paying newspaper job, in 1957 at age 19, was covering Champaign High School sports for the Champaign-Urbana (Illinois) Courier, and the basketball coach there, Lee Cabutti, was nice enough to give me a grounding in the game’s tactical side. That gave me a leg up as an observer.

`              As reporter and fan I’ve followed the game closely since, and its improvement in all areas can only be called immense. Back in the 1950s most players over 6-feet-4-inches tall could pretty much be written off as stiffs. Today point guards routinely top that height. High-school teams now are better than good college teams were then. The NBA is so good it can be enjoyed as performance art. The women’s game has kept pace, and then some; on a percentage basis its improvement has surpassed that of the men’s.

             Much of that can be traced to the nature of the game. It’s five players on a side as opposed to nine in baseball and 11 in football, meaning that it affords individuals a greater chance to shine. Basketball courts require less real estate than baseball or football fields and, thus, are more suitable to urban environments. Equipment costs are small—a ball alone suffices, no protective gear is needed.

 Football can be dangerous—someone’s out to get you on every snap. Baseball can be boring—an outfielder can stand around for hours and get maybe two or three balls hit his way. Basketball is the most fun to play and practice; a kid can spend a pleasant day alone dribbling and shooting, and games can be played one-on-one or two-on-two, up to the regulation five-on-five.

               Coaching is better at every level, and not all of it takes place on a court in a formal setting. Just about every pro or major-college game is widely televised, and with instant replay and ex-coaches or players at every microphone, every game is a clinic for those at home. Kids today know about things like ball screens and box-and-ones from early ages. It’s like with computers—it’s as though they were born with the knowledge. 

               And while basketball was a seasonal sport in ancient times, it’s year-around today, with the high-school season followed by summer camps and AAU leagues. Specialized high schools that put sports first flourish; even some public schools play “national” schedules that include air travel to meet out-of-state foes. Some high-school games are on ESPN, and the players are too sophisticated to say “Hi, mom!”     

               Behind all that is the sociological change that has affected all our sports, but basketball the most: the field gates and gym doors opening wide to African-Americans. It was anything but instant. It’s well known that Major League Baseball was integrated by the elevation of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but less known that basketball took a full two-more decades before all its heavy bars were lifted.

The NBA signed its first black players in 1950, but it was a young and not-influential league at the time. The college game ruled then and took it’s time manning up. My school, the University of Illinois, had its first black basketball starter in 1957. He was Mannie Jackson, who later played for and still-later owned the Harlem Globetrotters. The Southeastern Conference didn’t integrate its teams until 1966, probably not incidentally the same year an all-black five from the University of Texas at El Paso defeated a favored all-white squad from the University of Kentucky for the NCAA crown.

In that same fateful year the empire struck back by banning dunk shots with its so-called “Lew Alcindor Rule,” informally named for the 7-foot-2 star, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who that season would lead UCLA to the first of three NCAA titles in his tenure there. Then as now most high schools followed college rules, so dunks were forbidden at that level, too. The NBA permitted dunking at the time but the practice wasn’t suffered gladly by foemen; any player who leaped for one could expect to have his legs cut out from under him.

 By the time the rule was repealed in 1976, just about everyone cheered. Dunking added a new dimension of showmanship to basketball and made it more fun to play and watch. Kids today learn to dunk on tiny goals before they learn to shoot.

The African-American ascent has lifted basketball, and brought riches to a few, but by me it hasn’t been an unmitigated boon. Too many black kids— and some white ones, too—fritter away their youths dribbling basketballs and dreaming hoops dreams to the exclusion of other goals, but for even the very talented making an NBA roster remains a struck-by-lightning proposition.  Someone should write a pamphlet for high-school basketballers titled “Have a Plan B.” Don’t read it, don’t play.