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.