Official Misconduct

The recent news of Tim Donaghy’s alleged complicity in fixing NBA games he officiated got me thinking I should again mention our mission on this website. The Educational Sports Betting Network isn’t necessarily interested in breaking news to our readers. Rather, we are interested in interpreting the news and offer insight into how the news of the day can be utilized in our handicapping and wagering pursuits – to gain an advantage over the betting lines.

You will recall, Donaghy AND the NBA originally had their stories straight that he didn’t actually fix the games. No, Donaghy was just a doofus information broker disseminating information that resulted in informed bets being placed by his cronies. Now, we find out that, statistically, Donaghy likely did fix some games himself. And if this is true, and my opinion is this is true, then the NBA has been lying to us since the scandal broke over 10 years ago.

As I write this, it has been about 36 hours since the new and improved story broke. Yet, there is precious little coverage of the real scope of this scandal. Here is a link to all the NBA related stories posted on Google, under the NBA tab, when I conducted the search three minutes ago (Note – I don’t know if these results will be “clickable” when this article gets posted on the ESBN site.).

You will see, the fifth box from the top (below the fold as we say) contains two stories about this scandal. These are the ONLY two stories related to the scandal on the NBA page. In other words, this was huge news yesterday, not so much today.

Why would that be?

If you are going to risk your hard-earned money betting sports, you gotta seek out information. You gotta ask yourself a lot of questions and you gotta ask the teams you’re betting a lot of questions. Well, not directly because they won’t take your calls. You gotta ask such things as “why will this team cover the point spread in this game?” And many other questions. This informs your opinion. You then go out and seek the information to answer your queries. Hence, you are not guessing like all the gamblers and guessers around you.

So, why did this story die on the vine?

Let me reiterate the real scandal – the scandal is not that Donaghy fixed games, as it now appears he did. The scandal is why did the NBA lie about it? If the ESPN story is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt its veracity, then the NBA is complicit with Donaghy in the fix AND engineered the resulting cover-up.

For handicappers, this is important! For gamblers and guessers, it’s just something else to argue about.

For handicappers, we may be able to infer that something like this goes on today. The NBA would like you to believe that all of its officials are above reproach. That Donaghy was a rogue agent and bad apple who acted on his own. This is WHY the story died. The NBA wants you to think this is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing and nothing like this is occurring now, or ever will again.

Why, then, does Action Network include an Officials tab on its NBA page (as well as its NFL page, but that season is over). Hmmm…the official is identified as are his home record against the spread, as well as how his games performed against the Total.

You might recall the hub-bub about the officials working the NFL AFC and NFC championship games.

As well as the officials assigned to work the Super Bowl.

I am not necessarily saying these dudes are crooked. What I am saying is – the official assignments probably DO matter more than you think. If you read Donaghy’s book Personal Foul, he made it very clear that the League wanted games called according to their protocol and to favor the “star” players. Hence, this is a valid angle to utilize when handicapping matchups. And you may well be able to spot a developing trend, before everyone else gets wind of it. That is HOW you make money at this.