Tim Donaghy’s not very believable book excerpts
Disgraced NBA ref Tim Donaghy is out to settle a score with the NBA. What kind of score he has to settle, I’m not so sure. After all, he was the one caught gambling on games, and the NBA hasn’t been shown to have done anything wrong yet.
Nonetheless, the vindictive gambler is trying to take the NBA down with him, as he accuses NBA refs and the NBA itself of fixing games and making unfair calls. With such subjectivity in the calls, it really wouldn’t be a huge shock–and the allegations about calling the game differently for certain players and coaches certainly ring true–but for some reason I’m not really inclined to trust a morally-bankrupt ref who was convicted of fixing games to make money, who now is writing a book to make money, and to attack the NBA.
In the first paragraph of some excerpts on Deadspin, there are already some questionable contradictions:
The referees working the game would sometimes make a modest friendly wager amongst themselves: first ref to give one of the bad boys a technical foul wouldn’t have to tip the ball boy that night.
Two things here:
1.) There are three refs in each game, so if the first ref to tech a player doesn’t have to tip the ball boy, there’s still two refs who would possibly have to tip him. I assume only one ref would tip him.
We usually ran the kid ragged with a variety of personal requests and then slipped him a $20 bill.
2.) Technical fouls don’t happen very often. Rasheed Wallace holds the record for techs in a season with 41, so even the best of the worst only got T-ed up once every 2 games, in his best season.
Donaghy also accuses other refs–by name–of fixing games, so he faces potential defamation charges if any of those refs take offense. He creates a conversation with Dick Bavetta, in which Bavetta talks about how the NBA uses him to fix games.
Bavetta went on to inform me that it wasn’t the first time the NBA assigned him to a game for a specific purpose. He cited examples, including the 1993 playoff series when he put New Jersey guard Drazen Petrovic on the bench with quick fouls to help Cleveland beat the Nets.
Donaghy claims that Bavetta was going to make sure that the Nuggets beat the Spurs on the road in the last game of the season in 2003-04, if the Nuggets needed to win for the playoffs, an easy claim to make considering that the Nuggets had already made the playoffs at that point and lost to the Spurs by 26.
I don’t think that many people will actually want to sue Donaghy, because his book won’t be widely believed, so those he defames won’t want to go through all the trouble of suing someone when they weren’t harmed very much from the book.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Well he was on 60 minutes, so his story is getting attention. I think people are curious to see what he has to say, and like Canseco, the more that comes out through other people (if that does indeed happen), the more believable his stories will become. I’m curious to see what happens after the book comes out how the media will react.
we should just get happy for ones parents in lieu of questioning this
I’ve said that least 2394034 times. The problem this like that is they are just too compilcated for the average bird, if you know what I mean