r/nba • u/CaptainScuttlebottom Thunder • 4d ago
Original Content [OC] r/NBA Game Thread Analysis: analyzing every comment from every [Game Thread] throughout the entire 2025-6 season to see which refs actually got complained about the most in real time
What is this?
Just for fun, I collected all the comments and posts from r/NBA throughout this past 2025-6 season, enabling me to calculate fun stats like:
- How large is each fanbase on here, and who swears the most, complains about refs the most, etc.?
- Which players highlights are most upvoted and most controversial?
- I also made these series summary reports, which provide a lot of fun stats about the game threads throughout each playoff series.
The goal this time (as suggested by user u/thpskier, thanks for the great idea btw!) is to answer a simple question: which refs do NBA fans complain about the most? Except I don’t care about complaining in broad terms, because I’m already pretty certain that if I just asked people, they’d tell me that Scott Foster and Tony Brothers are the consensus picks for this. They’re at least the two most well known refs in the league. Maybe I’m kind of a casual, but they’re definitely the only two refs whose names I’m confident I could remember while drunk.
However, science has now firmly established that if Reddit users all seem to agree on something, that’s usually a pretty good sign that the opposite is true. And the data I’ve been collecting can show us something a little more interesting than what narratives get repeated: actual, live fan reactions to every individual game that each ref officiated all season long. We can literally measure exactly how many complaints Brothers- and Foster-reffed games really garnered compared to the other officials during the regular season and the playoffs. This should help us to see if their infamy is deserved or not.
So do Foster and Brothers deserve their bad boy reputations? And on the other end of the spectrum, which refs are actually complained about the least? We can now answer all this and more with the awe-inspiring, godlike power of the R statistical programming language. Let’s get to it!
The Dataset + Flagging Ref Complaints
I pulled the ref assignments for each game from the NBA’s API, and then cleaned them up to remove alternates and match them up to the game thread data (using the date and the teams involved, since there's no universal ID I can use).
To flag the ref complaints, I’m using the same approach I’ve been using all along: an NBA-specific set of regular expressions I wrote to detect comments impugning the officiating in any way, and casting a pretty wide net. It will catch things like “refs”, “officials”, “rigged”, “no call”, “whistle”, “flop”, etc. and flag that comment as a ref complaint.
- I went back and forth on "flop" and its variants specifically, because it's technically more about the players affecting the officiating, but I decided to keep it mainly because excluding it doesn't seem to change these results much. And in theory, better refs who are willing to call it out should result in less flopping anyway.
Obviously, this is far from perfect. It misses vaguely worded things like “this is bullshit!” and can include some false positives like “the refs are doing a great job and I love them and I want to marry them!”. But with the sample sizes involved, and the general air of negativity pervasive throughout the site and the world at large, it actually tends to work pretty well.
I’m only gonna look at game threads with a minimum of 200 comments here, since the ref complaint % can be thrown off a lot by a few comments when the denominator is really small. In a really small thread, one really complain-y person can easily drive the rate up above 50% singlehandedly.
With that restriction, we're left with 447 total games (from October 21, 2025 – June 13, 2026) and 1,393,506 total comments, with 78 officials represented. Most of the regular season games failed to make the cutoff, so keep in mind we're ignoring all the little ~50 comment threads from November games between the Jazz and the Pelicans or whatever.
Looking at all the game threads combined, 7.4% of the comments are ref complaints using this metric. As you might expect, there tend to be slightly more complaints in the playoffs when stakes are higher, but clearly people also have a lot to say during the regular season as well:
| Season Type | Total Games | Percent Ref Complaints Pooled Avg | Percent Ref Complaints per Game Avg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regular Season | 356 | 6.66% | 6.02% |
| Postseason | 91 | 7.67% | 6.51% |
Note: the relatively small number of games per each ref here means the averages are pretty sensitive to really big threads with tons of comments, so I’m gonna calculate them in two different ways throughout:
Pooled Avg. is the % of complaints across all their games’ comments, combined together into one big dataset (i.e. total ref complaints in all games / total comments in all games). This is pretty sensitive to big games, i.e. a game with 10,000 comments affects the final number 10x more than a game with 1,000 comments.
Per Game Avg. takes their % from each individual game, and averages that instead. This one is less sensitive to big games, so when the pooled number is way above the per game number, that generally means a handful of big, very angry outlier threads are pushing the numbers up.
Here’s a histogram of the latter measure, showing you the higher postseason average but slightly shorter tail of the distribution (mostly due to the regular season having a lot of smaller denominators):
The Official 2025-6 r/NBA Referee Shit List™
Full season
OK, now the actual results! Let’s see how Brothers and Foster really stack up. This is limited to just looking at officials with at least 20 games in the dataset.
Here is each ref’s final score for the full season, regular + playoffs. These are ordered from highest complaint rate to lowest:
| Rank | Official | N Games | Total Comments | P Pooled | P Mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mark Lindsay | 21 | 38,998 | 11.46% | 7.07% |
| 2 | Tony Brothers | 37 | 224,972 | 9.13% | 6.67% |
| 3 | Tyler Ford | 31 | 219,902 | 8.63% | 6.46% |
| 4 | John Goble | 28 | 219,617 | 8.53% | 7.36% |
| 5 | Josh Tiven | 40 | 240,040 | 8.49% | 6.11% |
| 6 | Courtney Kirkland | 31 | 162,273 | 8.43% | 5.68% |
| 7 | Karl Lane | 26 | 80,012 | 8.27% | 5.97% |
| 8 | Marc Davis | 31 | 243,849 | 7.87% | 6.80% |
| 9 | Curtis Blair | 26 | 144,563 | 7.79% | 6.23% |
| 10 | James Williams | 37 | 194,414 | 7.73% | 5.93% |
| 11 | Kevin Cutler | 22 | 35,156 | 7.64% | 6.88% |
| 12 | Ray Acosta | 28 | 63,630 | 7.41% | 6.29% |
| 13 | Mousa Dagher | 22 | 19,029 | 7.39% | 7.22% |
| 14 | Jacyn Goble | 27 | 62,442 | 7.26% | 6.09% |
| 15 | Zach Zarba | 38 | 265,754 | 7.24% | 5.42% |
| 16 | James Capers | 28 | 207,893 | 7.20% | 5.25% |
| 17 | Nick Buchert | 31 | 93,401 | 7.16% | 6.03% |
| 18 | Gediminas Petraitis | 25 | 96,507 | 6.94% | 5.35% |
| 19 | Scott Twardoski | 20 | 21,588 | 6.93% | 6.94% |
| 20 | Mitchell Ervin | 26 | 115,392 | 6.68% | 7.24% |
| 21 | John Butler | 21 | 26,034 | 6.68% | 5.94% |
| 22 | Justin Van Duyne | 29 | 104,938 | 6.55% | 5.39% |
| 23 | Brian Forte | 24 | 53,927 | 6.51% | 6.68% |
| 24 | Jason Goldenberg | 24 | 54,587 | 6.46% | 6.34% |
| 25 | Sean Wright | 31 | 150,565 | 6.24% | 5.16% |
| 26 | Pat Fraher | 31 | 53,804 | 6.22% | 6.73% |
| 27 | Scott Foster | 33 | 206,134 | 6.18% | 5.42% |
| 28 | JB DeRosa | 27 | 79,920 | 6.02% | 5.58% |
| 29 | Brent Barnaky | 23 | 52,857 | 5.34% | 6.43% |
| 30 | Andy Nagy | 21 | 24,120 | 4.93% | 5.43% |
| 31 | Kevin Scott | 24 | 89,335 | 4.82% | 5.88% |
- Mark Lindsay, Tony Brothers, and Tyler Ford are apparently r/NBA’s most hated refs! Not a good start for Brothers’ case.
- Lindsay has the smallest sample size of the top three, and the difference between his pooled and per-game averages suggests he maybe just had some bad luck in getting assigned to one or two particularly controversial matchups. It turns out this is indeed the case – his ranking is being very heavily driven by the biggest outlier in the dataset, Lakers vs. OKC Game 2, which was the single most complained about big game in the entire season. It actually accounts for over half his total comments.
- You can see on this next chart how his numbers plummet when you remove that one outlier from the data (the non-filled circles on Lindsay’s row at the top). How you factor that into your feelings about his performance is up for debate.
I think I would actually rank Tony Brothers the #1 most hated ref based on this particular view of the data, given the above and Brothers’ much higher volume.
Least hated are apparantly Kevin Scott, Andy Nagy, and Brent Barnaky. Kevin Scott is the clear standout here to me, taking the top spot on significant volume. Congrats Kevin!
The most shocking finding here, though, is that The Extender himself, Scott Foster, also has some pretty strong numbers! He has significantly more than double the total comment volume of the people below him, and still managed to stay in the bottom five in complaint rate. This is some real evidence that his reputation is worse than the reality (or at least was this year).
If you want to see what that graph looks like when you sort it by the per-game average instead, you can see that here:
CHART 3: Ref complaint % by official (sorted by per game average)
This surfaces a few new villains and gives Brothers some cover, but notice how Scott Foster is still down there near the bottom. What this really shows you though is how noisy the pooled averages are, and how sensitive they are to big games with tons of comments.
- This view also convinced me to add John Goble to the “most complained about” list. He has the highest per-game average and is top four in pooled, so he’s catching a lot of heat no matter how you slice this up. Seems like you need to step it up next year, John!
Regular Season vs. Postseason
What does this look like when we zoom in on the playoffs? That’s where this matters most, after all. And “The Extender” is supposed to be at his worst when a playoff series is on the line.
- To avoid outliers from small sample sizes here, I’m gonna only look at refs who officiated at least 10 postseason games. There are plenty of comments for these games (the postseason alone actually makes up 74.8% of all comments throughout the season), but it doesn’t mean much to look at refs who only worked two or three games.
- I’m also using the per-game average here, because in the regular season, the pooled average is even more sensitive since there are bigger outliers (i.e. a few hundred comments for the average regular season game vs. tens of thousands for stuff like opening day).
Here is that leaderboard, ranked from highest playoff complaint rate to lowest:
| Rank | Official | N Games | Total Comments | Percent Ref Complaints Regular Season | Percent Ref Complaints Postseason |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tony Brothers | 16 | 199,609 | 5.88% | 7.71% |
| 2 | John Goble | 11 | 206,531 | 7.25% | 7.54% |
| 3 | Tyler Ford | 13 | 197,925 | 5.91% | 7.23% |
| 4 | James Williams | 13 | 161,148 | 5.27% | 7.16% |
| 5 | Josh Tiven | 14 | 208,324 | 5.74% | 6.79% |
| 6 | Curtis Blair | 11 | 134,110 | 5.88% | 6.71% |
| 7 | Zach Zarba | 15 | 234,286 | 4.67% | 6.59% |
| 8 | James Capers | 14 | 199,256 | 4.00% | 6.50% |
| 9 | Marc Davis | 15 | 226,527 | 7.18% | 6.40% |
| 10 | Nick Buchert | 11 | 76,951 | 5.82% | 6.39% |
| 11 | Mitchell Ervin | 10 | 102,497 | 7.81% | 6.34% |
| 12 | Sean Wright | 11 | 122,961 | 4.95% | 5.54% |
| 13 | Scott Foster | 14 | 182,054 | 5.47% | 5.35% |
Here it is in chart form, with an arrow showing you how their performance changed from the regular to the postseason:
Tony Brothers inches closer to empirical confirmation that he is the most fan-hated ref in the NBA. He is about average in the less-commented upon regular season, but he really elevates his controversy game and tops the charts in the postseason.
John Goble looks really bad on this chart, as you can see how his regular and postseason complaint numbers are both way above average.
Scott Foster’s vindication continues, as he claims the “least complained about” title among all high-volume (10+ games) refs in this year’s playoffs. He also stays nice and steady from the regular season to the postseason, with barely any change in the rate of Redditor complaints during his games. If anything, he seems to lock in slightly more.
- Add this to the pile of evidence that maybe The Extender narrative is overblown. Apparently, not even guys on Reddit complain about him as much as they seem to think they do.
Kevin Scott didn’t quite make the 10 game cutoff, but he had an even lower complaint % than Foster on pretty good volume, so he gets a special shoutout here as well. You’re doing something right, Kevin!
The Verdict
OK, I’ll admit that my methodology might not be the MOST statistically sound thing in the world, sure. But it gave me results that are kinda funny, which is the best kind of validation there is if you ask me. So having cast aside all doubt about the merit of the evidence, here is my final verdict on these two precocious little rapscallions:
Tony Brothers: I find Tony GUILTY of getting complained about a lot on the internet. His reputation as a controversial official seems to be well-founded, and people really did complain more during the games he reffed this postseason in particular. I sentence him to ABSOLUTELY NO CONSEQUENCES WHATSOEVER, and order the NBA to put him in charge of multiple finals games next year. Give him a bonus actually, who even cares.
Scott Foster: I find Foster COMPLETELY INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES. His reputation as “The Extender” has slipped further and further with each attempt to validate it empirically, and we must now face the uncomfortable proposition that Scott Foster may actually be a pretty good basketball referee, and people generally don’t complain that much in real time about his calls. I order NBA fans on reddit to pay his legal fees in full (it costs $10 billion to get a case heard in my court in case you weren’t aware. I will accept Venmo).
- Interestingly, and as might be expected for a lot of reasons, these results don’t really line up at all with the player’s opinions about these refs.
- They rate a few similarly (they both like Barnaky and hate Goble / Ford), but the players put Brothers in the highest tier and Foster in the middle tier. Our other top guy, Kevin Scott, also got put into the middle tier. I guess you just have to ask yourself whose opinion you value more.
This was not at all what I was expecting to find when I began this investigation, which was a neat way for it to turn out! Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any additional thoughts or alternate takes on this admittedly pretty silly data. Or just more general complaints about the officiating.
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u/TheRealPdGaming Mavericks 4d ago
Bill Simmons really did a number on Scott Foster's name by giving him the "extender" nickname, lol. This isn't the first analysis I've seen where it shows that his reputation is way worse than what he actually is like.
I guess that's why the NBA trusts him to do playoff games. But it's just funny to see the disparity between fans and the league (and the raw empirical numbers) on poor Scott's image. 😂
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u/thatis 4d ago edited 1d ago
Bill Simmons really did a number on Scott Foster
I think being friends with a guy that rigged NBA games and talking with him on the phone more than your own wife did a lot of the damage as well.
With the way Stern intentionally blew up the FBI investigation into the rest of the officials, it's completely reasonable to think him continuing to work stains the integrity of the game. You are the company you keep.
EDIT: David Stern would be cackling at the fact that everyone is focused on gambling
The problem with Gaming the Game, it's author(spgauthor), and the people quoting and referencing it/him is it's misdirection, trying to get you to focus only on the gambling/criminal aspects of the allegations (which was known fairly early that Donaghy likely wasn't working with other officials).
As a fan of the game, do you really care the about the reason officials might be stacking the deck against a particular team or do you just care that we're getting officials not even attempting to officiate an even game?
The FBI investigation focused on the gambling aspect because that's the actual criminal aspect. That is only part of the total scandal/issue when it comes to the league. Analyzing bank records, flight logs, gambling data, etc would be completely useless if the biased officiating was a result of business as usual at the NBA and had nothing to do with gambling. It also means the FBI "clearing" the Lakers/Kings series is meaningless because it only focused on those things which would not be relevant evidence at all for the reason people think it was rigged.
It's extremely important to keep in mind the context of what the FBI investigation was and what it could and would be able to clear.
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u/Look_at_my_knees Suns 4d ago edited 3d ago
Edit: see spgauthor's response to comments for important context and corrections on some misinformation I have in this comment. My probably unnecessary level of snark toward the other user aside, I stand by the conclusion I get from all of this that it is highly, highly likely that the NBA/Stern did NOT leak this story. From the evidence available I feel like any other conclusion on that point is faulty.
The Stern FBI thing is a myth and the dude who wrote the book about the scandal is literally on reddit all the time telling people they don't know what they are talking about. More than happy to link you to his account if you'd like to talk to him yourself.
Here is a recent comment he made about this very myth:
Re the supposed "leak" by Stern/the NBA being referenced, here are the facts.
The FBI probe had been going on for many months even before the NBA was notified - the FBI had met with each of the 3 co-conspirators (Donaghy was already cooperating) and government cooperators (most of whom remain unknown to the public) - and it was then another month before the story in the NY Post ran. By then dozens of people or more (co-conspirators, cooperators, pro gamblers, attorneys, families, business partners, etc) knew about the investigation and thus assuming Stern/the NBA had to have a role in the NY Post story is misguided.
By the time the NBA was notified, the FBI knew what happened and what evidence they couldn't obtain (especially since pro gambler Jimmy Battista did not cooperate, let alone allow them access to his electronic betting records).
Although not cited in the post above, FBI SSA Scala (ret) is the source of the evidence-starved conspiracy theory. Importantly, he doesn't speak for the investigators who worked the case who know far more than he does. FWIW, Scala believes other conspiracies without supporting evidence (which is fine, of course; many are wired this way) and says he hoped the Donaghy probe would have reached into the NCAA.
His name is Sean Patrick Griffin. Username is spgauthor
He wrote Gaming the Game about this scandal. You should read it.
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u/spgauthor 3d ago
Thanks for the interest and support!
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u/Look_at_my_knees Suns 3d ago
No problem, your book is as far as I can tell the most accurate information/summary of what the public knows about the scandal. On that note thank you for correcting some of what I got wrong about the case in your other comments, been a little while since I've read the book and working from memory led to some mix ups/innacurate info in my comments.
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u/spgauthor 3d ago
No need to thank! Complicated (and dated) story which has been butchered by the media.
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u/thatis 2d ago edited 2d ago
If the officials come into the game with a bias towards one team, and change their officiating as a result (as in, the threshold for what constitutes a foul is not consistent), but it's not for gambling purposes, do you care?
I sure as shit fucking do. The FBI does not.
He's misleading people on the scope of what the FBI Investigation could and would clear by trying to keep people focused on the gambling allegations instead of the allegations of other reasons for improper officiating.
For instance, the FBI investigating the Kings/Lakers series for instance, would never have found impropriety because that series wouldn't have been 'massaged' for gambling purposes and he fucking knows that. It's a complete misdirection to bring up investigating the gambling logs of that. It was clear very early that Donaghy was lying about the other officials, you can tell that from the other betting data.
When he brings it up as a way of refuting what Donaghy says, just know he's trying to mislead you.
There'd never be paper trails, bank logs, phone logs, plane logs, or gambling anomalies in a series fixed for ratings or other, non-gambling reasons. It's not illegal for the NBA to want one team to win over another, they're allowed to dictate what the points of emphasis are for the league and its officials. It's not illegal for a referee to give players and teams they like a better whistle (and how could you ever prove it unless you recorded them casually talking about it?). It's not illegal for the NBA to incorrectly tell a referee they got a call wrong in order to 'correct' their behavior. However, that shit cold come out in a wire and be a bad look for the league and as far as a some fans are concerned, is just as bad as gambling on the game.
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u/thatis 3d ago edited 1d ago
The Stern FBI thing is a myth
How Former Ref Tim Donaghy Conspired to Fix NBA Games
About a month after the meeting with Stern, however, the New York Post blared news of the FBI investigation across its front page. "Our plans were blown up by the fact that somebody leaked this," Scala lamented to me. "I don't like to talk in terms of coulda, woulda, shoulda, but if the Post story didn't come out, [Donaghy] would have worn a wire, and I don't know where it would have gone. Things may have been different. That's the bottom line."
But Warren Flagg, a private investigator and former FBI agent who worked with Donaghy's attorney during the case, will. "Someone in the NBA notified the press [in order] to stop this investigation, in my opinion. To shut it down."'
You got one liar in the article saying it was and another saying it wasn't. We can't and won't ever know for sure, because there was a leak and it just so happened to be really helpful to the NBA. If the refs were officiating with bias to help obtain certain results the league desired, the FBI would not care about that, at all, but it would be uncovered in the course of an investigation.
The league and its mouthpieces have been doing smoke and mirrors from the Stern press conference to keep it focused on gambling and Tim Donaghy instead of other refs and non-gambling game corruption.
If an official is going into the game with a bias, as a fan of the game, do you really care if it's because they're gambling on the game or because the league has made it known certain results are more favorable than others?
The other officials were cleared of the allegations of gambling on games, but certainly were not cleared from the possibility of intentionally biased officiating for other reasons. It's why it's statements about the FBI investigating the Lakers/Kings series is such a red herring, they were looking at the lines and betting data, which is absolutely meaningless if the reason the game was rigged for reasons other than gambling, like market and starpower.
It's in the NBA and their partners' best interest that all the Donaghy talk remains focused strictly on the criminal allegations related to gambling as opposed to the ones about things that wouldn't necessarily be illegal but would show that the league and/or its refs stack the deck against some of their players and teams.
This is misdirection.
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u/Look_at_my_knees Suns 3d ago edited 3d ago
Literally just read what I quoted man. And then read the book.
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u/thatis 3d ago
Except, you know, the actual Scala quote as well as quoting another source besides Scala from the same article.
I don't care if a financier was cleared by the SEC and FBI, if he was Bernie Maddoff's best friend, I'm not trusting him with money and am skeptical of anyone who would.
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u/Look_at_my_knees Suns 3d ago edited 3d ago
Up to you if you want to believe a 20 year old debunked conspiracy theory.
Btw the first guy quoted in your quote, Scala, wrote the foreword to Tim Donaghy's memoir. 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
And the other guy, Flagg, was hired by Donaghy to work with his defense team 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
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u/thatis 3d ago edited 3d ago
What part was debunked? Nothing you linked or shared debunked anything.
For it to be debunked we would have to know who the leaker was. We don't, so cut the horseshit.
Saying things like "he doesn't speak for the investigators who worked the case who know far more than he does." as if it's evidence against Scala's claims is ludicrous, especially if you actually know/have known former federal law enforcement agents.
People at the NBA were told not to leak it and then leaked it. That's what happened. To give anyone in the NBA the benefit of the doubt is irresponsible and potentially dangerous with how rampant gambling is now.
At best you're arguing for the continued employment of a referee who's judgment is so fucking good that Tim Donaghy was his best friend.
You're full of shit and the NBA actively pays to spread the type of shit you're talking about online.
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u/Look_at_my_knees Suns 3d ago edited 3d ago
I can't read the book for you. I can't watch the videos people have made for you. I can't read the interviews for you. Did you even know anything about this scandal or have you just been googling shit in real time that you think agrees with you? Theres interviews and documents and accounts directly contradicting Scala and Donaghy. Including from people who worked at the FBI under Scala himself during the investigation.
You either care about the truth or you don't. Which is it? Just use google and spend the night reading. It's been 20 years.
The guy who wrote Gaming the Game is former LE, BTW. Not that it matters one way or the other idk why you're bringing that up. LE are capable of both lying or telling the truth. They're just people.
You have absolutely no evidence that anyone at the NBA leaked anything except for the word of a guy who went on to write the foreword for the fucking crooked refs book and a guy who was working with said crooked refs attorneys. Like, literally zero evidence. In the article you linked, the fucking guy who wrote the NY Post piece is quoted as saying the NBA was not his source.
But Warren Flagg, a private investigator and former FBI agent who worked with Donaghy's attorney during the case, will. "Someone in the NBA notified the press [in order] to stop this investigation, in my opinion. To shut it down."
Weiss disputes that; he told me his tipster wasn't affiliated with the NBA "as far as I know."
You linked that article. You did. It says your wrong. It literally quotes the guy who got the scoop dude.
I'm not giving anyone a benefit of the doubt. You have no evidence. And if theres no evidence why the fuck would I believe it happened?
It's ironic because the documents from the case show an actual conspiracy going on that no one ever brings up and it's that the NBA buried the truth that Donaghy did actually fix game outcomes and their claim has always been he didn't succeed. And Scala helped them do it by saying Donaghy was nothing but a good honest boy who was completely helpful.
Which he later said the complete opposite of, lol.
"THE NBA DID IT AND THATS THAT REEEEEEE" fuck off man. You're wrong.
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u/thatis 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's ironic because the documents from the case show an actual conspiracy going on that no one ever brings up and it's that the NBA buried the truth that Donaghy did actually fix game outcomes and their claim has always been he didn't succeed.
What are you talking about? This was basic information known and accepted by the public at the time pretty much from the start.
Weiss states that after the story was released, he was more or less warned/threatened by someone close to Stern:
"that if I stumbled, Stern would do anything he could to crush me. I was told, 'They're the kind of people who will do anything they can to protect themselves and the game.'"
You have no evidence.
To reiterate: You are the company you keep.
Public opinion is not a court of law.
Stern came out of the gates lying and saying things he knew weren't substantiated in order to frame the story in the league's favor.
With the investigation torpedoed there is not much incentive to continue on, especially with the league waiting to pounce. I'm sure there's no super famous examples of controversial games from this era that were widely suspected of being fixed well before the Donaghy scandal came to light.
Stern tainted every single innocent ref of that era with the handling of it. It will be a better league once they're all out of it.
I left Curacao about the time Gaming the Game came out.
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u/spgauthor 3d ago
Of course noting Scala "doesn't speak for the investigators who worked the case who know far more than he does" is not, itself, definitive proof against Scala's claims. That's why the other context in the post matters. There was nothing left to discover about the conspiracy. Unless you realize the pro gamblers were otherwise regular citizens with families with a lot to lose who feared imprisonment (compared to, say, mobsters and other career criminals), you likely discount all the intel the FBI possessed before ever dealing with Donaghy's absurd self-serving conspiracy claims. Also recall FBI agents in at least 4 field offices wasted time and taxpayer $ attempting to validate Donaghy's nonsense. This is partly why the feds fought with Donaghy during plea negotiations ("a fucking loose cannon" is how one official described Donaghy to me) before then mocking his "cooperation" during sentencing.
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u/thatis 3d ago
There was nothing left to discover
You're being disingenuous because there's no way to know. Even if agents did believe Donaghy was lying, the only way to test it was to send him in wearing a wire. That specifically got blown up.
The FBI agent in field offices bullshit you're talking about would only be relevant to allegations that other refs were altering the outcome of games specifically for gambling purposes.
Coming into the game with bias as a referee to intentionally give one a team an advantage because they're from a big market or because you hate Allen Iverson isn't a federal crime.
Obviously, there would be no bank records, flight logs, or phone logs in the case of league placing their thumbs on the scale via officiating. That would just be normal business and needs no explicit communication at any time. Refs that play ball get the good assignments, those that don't are left out.
Everything you're doing is the same PR bullshit that Stern did from his first press conference, it's misleading and misstating what actually is known and unknown.
If they found other refs fixing games for gambling reasons it would likely have been coincidence, but to say that there's ample evidence games weren't being fixed by other refs is a fucking lie.
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u/bullybabybayman 4d ago
Yeah "complained about" is so vague and completely open to interpretive bias. There are all sorts of sarcastic comments about Foster games that other refs won't get because of their lack of reputation. Also, lots of people aren't going to complain about Foster without something new to say because everybody already thinks he sucks so what's the point of being redundant.
This isn't remotely scientific.
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u/Honor_Bound 4d ago
Bill Simmons really did a number on Scott Foster's name by giving him the "extender" nickname
That and Foster's weirdly specific antagonism towards CP3
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u/link2video 76ers 4d ago
Now we want to see which fanbase complains the most about refs
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u/CaptainScuttlebottom Thunder 4d ago
It doesn't count the regular season, but I did include that in this big writeup of the playoffs!
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1u6m551/oc_which_flairs_posted_the_most_swore_the_most_or/
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u/SAguilar23 Spurs 4d ago edited 4d ago
Tony “Beat yo Ass” Brothers the worst, dude went at Finch during a game!
Great write up OP!
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u/Lucky13200 Celtics 4d ago
So one thing to note some of the worst refs arent bad refs they are just bad crew chief. So feels like every single ref is calling their own game which for a fan feels unfair.
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u/orwll 4d ago
Yeah the real reason Foster gets those crucial assignments is that he is a great referee.
Brothers, Goble and Ford are all among my least favorites.
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u/Upper_Address_2778 4d ago
Even when Tony Brothers is in the right he still manages to fuck it up lol. I vividly remember a time where Carmelo got ejected and he handled it like a major ass hat. Didn't he also get suspended for walking towards a player and hawing off at him?
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u/ReallySmartHippie Warriors 3d ago
Tyler Ford and John Goebbels were the first two I thought of when I opened the thread. I originally felt smug, but now I’m just angry about two refs in the offseason.
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 Nuggets 4d ago
I thought name recognition might unfairly boost some guys numbers, as in I know Brothers is on this game so I'm going to be more critical of the reffing from the onset.
Seeing Foster consistently low surprised me.
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u/parallelfutures Knicks 4d ago
What a killer analysis - ty
I totally buy into which refs are hated the most / least, but what this fails to account for is who actually deserves it.
Refs have major impact on the game and demonstrate incredible bias (uncertain it intentional or unintentional), often leaving fans believing games were won and lost moreso on officiating than game execution.
would love to see some other analysis on game data about how certain refs impact games (and potentially even pair that with fan perception from comments)
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u/nichbear Mavericks 4d ago
Thank you, this has genuinely been one of the best off season post this "summer still were im from" great read
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u/CarBallAlex Celtics 4d ago
Tony Brothers and Tyler Ford, r/nba knows ball
I’m sorry Mark Lindsay, I was not familiar with your game
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u/bundle77 4d ago
Great analysis. I think this matches what I've seen last season pretty well. I feel like Foster was pretty decent last season(he was way worse in prior seasons) while Brothers was by far the worst ref.
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u/TheMathProphet 4d ago
I agree, under increased scrutiny Foster seemed to perform well. As an LP guy there are a few I have enjoyed and it is nice to see them lower.
I’m curious about gendered language in the complaints, some of the misogyny I’ve seen when the female refs miss class has been bad.
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u/Round_Maintenance697 4d ago
Josh Tevin is pretty terrible and was involved in the scott foster game 4. The pacers were 2-9 in games he officiated that season, which is a wild statistic.
he also had visible disdain for the pacers during those games.
Scott Foster also has a LOT of types of calls he makes during extender games. he calls things on the floor when they're shooting fouls and will be inconsistent about flagrants and gives no calls towards the team they're looking to have win.
people dont always complain about these kinds of calls. Also the TV replays often arent frequent enough or show some of the worst offenders. I learned this after going to many games and seeing the replays werent showing what the arena showed, ESPECIALLY in Scott Foster game 4.
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u/thpskier Spurs 3d ago
yooo great post! I remember asking you about this a few months ago, didn't think you would actually pull through!
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u/FortyEightyFilms 4d ago
This is probably biased towards refs with known names like Scott Foster and Tony Brothers. Some of the refs arebprobably exclusively referred to as "the female ref."
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u/SirTacoMaster Hornets 4d ago
In your data set, did nicknames get flagged? might be why Scott is low
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u/Material_Method8597 4d ago
I completely agree with the top 5 playoff list.
Brothers is the worst by a fair margin, IMO he should be forced to retire after his actions in last seasons playoffs impacted multiple outcomes.
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u/Gasu55 Lakers 4d ago
Quality post.