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Comment by metabagel | Hacker News Reader

Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 2008 was pretty darn obvious. Anyone who watched that game had to have known that the game was fixed.

http://www.espn.com/nba/news/story?id=3436401

“The Lakers attempted 40 free throws to the Kings' 25 in that game, and Los Angeles made 21 of 27 from the line while Sacramento converted 7 of 9 in the fourth quarter alone.

In addition, a foul was called against Mike Bibby of the Kings after he was shoved and elbowed by Kobe Bryant, denying the Kings an opportunity to try for a tying basket. Also in that game, Kings centers Vlade Divac and Scot Pollard fouled out, and Kings coach Rick Adelman was highly critical of the officiating afterward.”

It’s actually worse than that. Bryant drove into Bibby, committing an obvious offensive foul with an elbow to the nose which gave Bibby a nosebleed. Bibby was called for a personal foul for his nose fouling Kobe in the elbow.

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I would like to see a more objective scoring. Lopsided foul ratios are not solid evidence of bias by themselves. Teams play different styles and sometimes have bad defensive nights.

Nor is a single bad call evidence of bias, such as the nosebleed incident.

An example of a good evaluation would be several professional referees, not employed by the NBA, observe the videos of that game from different angles, and score the accuracy and fairness of each call and potential non-call, including which referee made the call and/or was closest.

I don't wish to accuse people of conspiracies without strong and detailed evidence. And, too many teams habitually blame the refs for bad results to deflect their own shortcomings as a team. I've heard "wolf" far too many times.

There is human error and thus randomness in referee calls. But as they say, luck favors the prepared. If you don't want bad calls deciding the game, then get good enough to have the margin of error in your favor.

”Lopsided foul ratios are not solid evidence of bias by themselves. Teams play different styles”

Also, near the end of the game, I expect losing teams to commit more fouls, giving up free throws to prevent their opponent from using up the shot clock time.

”observe the videos of that game from different angles”

Ideally, you would process the video so that you can’t see who the players are or which team the player is on. I fear that isn’t possible, though. Experts likely will recognize players from their length and the way they play.

If the plays are dissected carefully, then the person involved shouldn't matter a whole lot. For example, a "flagrant foul" instead of a "common foul" may be a possibility if one does a "wind up" (pull back and then forward) of their arm(s) before a facial hit. If there's a disagreement about what constitutes a wind-up, then other wind-ups on other videos are analyzed and a mutual agreement hopefully appears about whether a specific case matches the agreed-upon working rule(s).

Perhaps the actual calls from the other game videos are used as a reference, such as whether a mere hint of wind-up is enough to score as such, or if the pull-back has to be very clear. Since different refs may have diff interpretations, perhaps the ref's history should be used as a guide. After all, the key question is about whether a specific game or season is "fixed", not all games from a given ref. If a ref has say 3 years of requiring mostly clear wind-up motions, and they were consistent on this during the target game, it probably wouldn't be considered an oddity.

Sure, that's a lot of digging and a lot of work, but if a play-off conspiracy has potential merit, it's worth it.

You can be the judge. Here is the video. This wasn’t a close call. It was an egregiously wrong call. There was no way that ten out of ten impartial referees wouldn’t call this a foul on Kobe.

https://youtu.be/mbWgWZjo1nI

Referees sometimes miss solid calls. No human can get 100% right when things happen in a fraction of a second. The Rams/Saints playoff game had a famous example (although there are conspiracy claims surrounding that also). I'll go with Hanlon's razor until something solid comes up.

I think you mean 2002 not 2008. And yeah that game sure did seem skewed in the lakers favor.

2002*. But yeah, agree. 1993 and 2000 Western Conference Finals Game 7s as well.

You misread the article. It was 2002 and wasn't the NBA Finals.

Yeah, I didn’t read very carefully. I was just looking for any article on the game. I didn’t recall it being in the NBA Finals, but I let the wording of the article confuse me.

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