Outside of the Box (part 1): Proven Facts of Match-Fixing in the NBA
Don’t Feel Bad Pacer fans, Roy Hibbert isn’t the first to feel the wrath of Stern
Watching last night’s Eastern Conference Final “Game 7″ reminded me of watching wrestling back in 2001. That year the WrestleMania main event was “Stone Cold” Steve Austin vs. The Rock, who had just agreed to a movie deal to be in the next two
The Mummy movies. I watched the match on a friend’s bootleg cable box and watched hoping that the Rock would win the match, go to Hollywood and walk on stage putting Brendan Fraiser’s candy ass to shame.
But it didn’t happen. Stone Cold won, The Rock got “injured” and was out of WWF action for eight months, and I realized wrestling was fake as Santa Claus.
I imagine that’s how a lot of basketball fans feel after watching last night’s game, so in celebration of “Tell-It-All Tuesday” I’m dropping some knowledge that will put your spirits at ease.
It’s all a game. In a more complex sense than you would imagine.
Just so you guys know, the NBA is fixed each year in conjunction with Vegas and advertising agencies.
Each time the playoffs roll around, certain refs get “inside info” that calls them to either extend series so the league generates more revenue, or finagle the final scores so Vegas doesn’t lose that much money.
These two guys fu*ked with the system.
Jordan started betting on sports when people and casinos began to fix table games against him, which would make him Pete Rose if the league didn’t have so much money tied up in him.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/131997-mjs-1st-retirement-was-it-a-secret-suspension
Donaghy messed around and began taking advantage of his knowledge of which games would be fixed to pay off his own debts, something the league took notice of because of their business ties. Excerpt below is from Wikipedia.
June 10, 2008, Donaghy’s attorney filed a court document alleging, among other things, that Game 6 of the
2002 Western Conference Finals between the
Los Angeles Lakers and
Sacramento Kings was fixed by two referees. The letter states that Donaghy “learned from Referee A that Referees A and F wanted to extend the series to seven games. Tim knew Referees A and F to be ‘company men’, always acting in the interest of the NBA, and that night, it was in the NBA’s interest to add another game to the series.”[SUP]
[39][/SUP] The Lakers won Game 6, attempting 18 more
free throws than the Kings in the fourth quarter, and went on to win the
2002 NBA Finals. The teams were not named, but the Western Conference Finals was the only seven-game series that year.[SUP]
[40][/SUP]The document claimed that Donaghy told federal agents that to increase television ratings and ticket sales, “top executives of the NBA sought to manipulate games using referees”.[SUP]
[39][/SUP] It also said that NBA officials would tell referees to not call
technical fouls on certain players, and states that a referee was privately reprimanded by the league for ejecting a star player in the first quarter of a January 2000 game.[SUP]
[39][/SUP] Stern denied the accusations, calling Donaghy a “singing, cooperating witness”.After the ref scandal came out the league began using shot manipulation technology, unseen technology that can control the outcome of games on the spot by controlling whether shots go in or not. That way referee involvement is minimized and no one, besides the NBA, has full knowledge of the outcome of a game.
Right now the current fix is Heat/Spurs, because they’re the only two teams at full strength with ring experience.
With a conference final you want at least two teams with a top ten media market ranking. Along with that, you want an NBA sponsored player (Chris Paul, Kevin Durant, etc) in the mix and this year that wasn’t possible due to injuries to Boston, L.A., OKC. So we had Indiana in a seven game series to make up for the ad revenue lost by setting up in Indiana instead of LA. Here are rankings below.
Sports Media Watch – NBA Market Size Numbers Game
You’ll never hear NBA analysts speak on this because they all depend on the NBA for their livelihood. Listen to an ESPN broadcast during the Finals and hear how many times you hear, “Don’t get fired.”
I’ll get into the technology with a later post but for now, I’ll pique your interest with alleged times the technology was used.
Examples:
2004 Western Semi-Finals: The Lakers had an old, but star-filled team and stood to make more money than the San Antonio Spurs. A team that had talent but no American stars that were marketable. Because the U.S. was at war and in an Olympic year (which Manu Ginobli beat the U.S and became a gold medalist) the Americans won. By any means necessary.
2009 Eastern Finals: This game was meant to parallel Michael Jordan’s career with LeBron James. Jordan’s most iconic shot was his game winning jumper that game
against Cleveland in March of 1990, before he won his first championship. This was supposed to inspire the belief that LeBron’s career was aligned with the Greatest of All Time.
Look familiar?
2012 Western Quarterfinals (Avoided Western Semifinal with 3 teams at the bottom of NBA’s media market [OKC, Memphis, San Antonio] Memphis made one shot in 7 minutes in the last minutes of the 4th quarter.
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2012 Finals (Heat HAD to win to hoist the trophy in Miami. sh*t could’ve gotten ugly if the Heat won in OKC)
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Every sport across the world is dirty, look at soccer and you’ll see hundreds of matches being fixed by different gambling organizations across the country. The NBA is beautiful, because not only do they have a way to complete control games without dealing with people directly, they maintain legitimacy by not allowing anyone else to speak on it without sounding like a tinfoil.
After last night’s game you gotta ask yourself…is it really a bad thing?
