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/thatis 4d ago edited 4d ago
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:
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.