What? Sports referees are biased and are screwing my team? It is a story that started as soon as the first game with a referee was played. Refs are human and make bad calls. They will sometimes make a mistake and overcorrect or make a makeup call. Also, even with perfect refereeing, if you slice the stats enough, you will find bias in random noise.
As for the NBA, there are known biases: if a superstar and bench warmer make contact on a play, the refs will always favor the star. Bigger players are allowed to bang in the paint while smaller players are protected. Refs will only call a blatant charge and never if there is a defense foul on the play. As long as I can remember (20 years), if a player or coach whined about refereeing after the game, they would automatically get a fine but coaches would still do it so that refs favor their team’s next game for fear of providing evidence to the story.
There is always a story that the league is pushing the popular team. Before the Lakers it was the Warriors who the refs favored (it was infuriating fun to count how many moving screens Draymond could get away with).
As someone who likes to read articles, holy @#$% was that clickbait-y and a lot of time (11 min) invested to get a couple minutes of content - no description anywhere of the ‘must-watch’ talking points. Okay, rant over. Mired in all the fluff were two good points: Lakers’ free throw attempt (FTA) disparity over the last 2 years, and play-by-play data to show that based on the shots the Lakers take one wouldn’t expect them to be top of the charts in FTAs. I dug into the FTA disparity a little more.
In the 2022 championship season, the Lakers didn’t make the playoffs, and they ranked 16th in FTA difference in the regular season. Did Silver call for a change after this?
In the 2023 regular season, the Lakers averaged 5.8 more FTAs a game than their opponent (476 more FTAs total), for 1st place in the league. 2nd place was the Kings (2.1 a game, 173 overall).
In the 2023 postseason, the Lakers averaged 7.6 more FTAs a game than their opponent, for 1st place among playoff teams. 2nd place was the Knicks at 5.4.
So far in the 2024 regular season, the Lakers averaged 6.0 more FTAs a game than their opponent (471 more FTAs total), for 1st place in the league. 2nd place was the Celtics (2.9 a game, 226 overall).
Prediction: Lakers leading the league in FTAs will continue the rest of this season and in the postseason.
I stopped watching when it was blindingly obvious how they would let the then-dominant warriors build legitimate massive leads in the first quarter and then the refs would constantly penalize them for absolutely nothing until the 4th quarter to orchestrate a tight game before letting the warriors play again at the end. Then the warriors would be praised for being so good in the 4th.
I wasn’t a warriors fan. But the way the refs orchestrated pretty much every warriors game like it was a drama made it seem a lot more like WWE than a legitimate sport.
Thanks for sharing this, I’m glad I heard of it. If you want to start discussion, especially about a video that doesn’t contain any details in the title, put a sentence or two in the Lemmy post description about what it is, what you want to discuss, etc. Lemmy isn’t a click for ads platform; it’s humans talking to humans
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