LOOK: ESPN Re-Examines NBA-Tim Donaghy Game-Fixing Scandal
Today, February 19th, Scott Eden of ESPN released a very detailed re-examination of the NBA-Tim Donaghy game-fixing scandal. There are six parts (or acts, as they’re labeled on ESPN) to the investigation, providing readers with information never seen before. The first five tell the story, yet the sixth-and-final one has the real meat — it gives us the numbers.
Donaghy, according to the report, reffed 40 games during his time involved in the scandal and an abnormal amount featured calls in favor of the heavy betting action.
It is normal, of course, for a referee to call more fouls against one team than the other. There will almost always be an imbalance of calls. But examine that imbalance against the financial imbalances discovered in the trading histories-which side received the heavier betting — and the important comparison isn’t between Donaghy’s foul calls and the team that won the game. The important comparison is to the team that received the greater amount of betting dollars.
Once we completed all of that, what we uncovered was that Donaghy’s foul calls favored the team that received the heavier betting 70 percent of the time. But we also found that in 10 games during that 40-game span, one team was defeating the other team to such a degree that the spread was rarely in doubt. A referee wishing to manipulate game scores on these occasions would likely find he lacked much ability to sway the matter — or the need to do so, if the score was already in his favor. And so, controlling for blowouts by removing those games from the ledger, what we ultimately found was this: Donaghy favored the side that attracted more betting dollars in 23 of those 30 competitive games, or 77 percent of the time. In four games, he called the game neutrally, 50-50. The number of games in which Tim Donaghy favored the team that attracted fewer betting dollars? Three.
In other words, Donaghy’s track record of making calls that favored his bet was 23-3-4.
If one assumes there should be no correlation between wagers and the calls made by a referee, the odds of that disparity* might seem unlikely. And they are. When presented with that data, ESPN statisticians crunched the numbers and revealed: The odds that Tim Donaghy would have randomly made calls that produced that imbalance are 6,155-to-1.
Included in ESPN’s findings are many specific instances of Donaghy’s malfeasance, including one game that benefited our hometown Washington Wizards — “Donaghy on March 14 in Indianapolis calling four straight fouls in the fourth against the underdog Pacers when they were losing by six to the visiting Wizards. Favored by 6, the visiting Wizards covering.”
Donaghy declined to comment for the story and continues to deny fixing games. Towards the end of the report, however, some sources say he’s come clean in private.
The complete report, which features thousands upon thousands of words, can be found here.
Featured Image: Keith Allison [CC BY-SA 2.0], from Flickr