The NBA will resume its regular season tomorrow night after its pause to stage the All-Star Fiasco. Teams have played about 55 games meaning there are a little more than 25 games left for each squad. Adam Silver and the PR honks at NBA HQs will turn themselves inside out denying this, but from here on out, most of the teams and players will take the games a lot more seriously than they have since the season began last October. So, I decided to look at the standings to see what’s what as of today and to think about outcomes down the road.
Let me start at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. You can comfortably write off the Hornets, Wizards and Pistons. As of this morning, the combined record for those three misery sites is 30-132 (win percentage = .185). Five teams (Knicks, Sixers, Pacers, Heat and Magic) are bunched within three games of one another in the middle of the pack; they will be part of the playoff picture when the time arrives.
The only serious question related to the NBA Eastern Conference in my mind is this:
- Is there a team that will present a serious challenge to the Celtics for the #1 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs?
As of this morning, the Celtics lead the Conference by 6 games over the Cavs and by 8.5 games over the Bucks. The Celtics have 27 games left to play, so that lead is hardly insurmountable; but I have little to no faith in the Bucks and only a smidgen of faith in the Cavs.
Out west, it is a different story. Indeed, there are three bottom feeders there as there are in the East; no one will blame you if you simply ignore the Spurs, Blazers and Grizzlies. Their combined record is better than the combined record of the Eastern Dregs, but it is still an unimpressive 46-119 (win percentage = .279).
Unlike the Eastern Conference where there is a logjam in the middle of the standings, the Western Conference standings have the top ten teams separated by a total of 11 games. The Top 4 teams (Timberwolves, Thunder, Clippers and Nuggets) are separated by only 3 games. Here is my “Bottom Line” for the balance of the NBA regular season:
- A random game involving two Western Conference teams is more likely to be an entertaining/intensely played game than a random game involving two Eastern Conference teams.
Switching gears … I guess that there have always been doomsayers and conspiracy theorists in the world. In the Bible, Job cried out:
“Therefore, I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”
However, the Internet seems to have given folks of that bent a megaphone to spread their views far and wide. [Aside: It would be uncharitable for anyone here to point out that I am using the Internet as a megaphone to spread my views far and wide.] And one of the “Conspiracies du jour” is that NFL games are rigged. You need not have the Internet searching abilities of an AI algorithm to find “video evidence” of the referees – – as agents of whoever is masterminding the “Conspiracy du jour” – – having unambiguously blown a critical call that changed the course of game history. I say “Feh!” to those assertions for two reasons.
First, the force that “polices” the natural order of the games is highly motivated to keep things on the up-and-up. That police force is the sportsbook industry itself which makes billions of dollars annually and is not going to take kindly to anything that threatens to kill that golden goose. Just looking at legal betting outlets in the US, the money bet on NFL games – – Exhibition Games through the Super Bowl Game – – is in the range of $50B. The annual profit for the books is in the 7-8% range so the profit is about $3.75B. To put that in perspective, the Baltimore Orioles franchise just sold for a valuation of $1.75B; the sportsbooks’ profits for one year could possibly buy two MLB franchises.
And the folks who run the sportsbooks are not going to lose out to “rigged games” at the betting window or to “rigged games” destroying the credibility that leads folks to make their wagers in the first place. Those sportsbooks have “skin in the game”; I have a lot more confidence in their watchdog abilities than I do any local police force or even the FBI. [And if anyone asks why I am so sure that it is not the FBI that is rigging the games, I will ask them – politely to be sure – to take their eyeballs elsewhere.]
The second reason I do not believe any of the “rigged games assertions” is captured in the adage known as Hanlon’s Razor:
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
I would replace the word “stupidity” there with “human error”. Do NFL officials make erroneous calls? Yes. Do NFL officials miss penalties thereby allowing an advantage to the offending team on that play? Yes. Do they make those mistakes on purpose and/or because they have been “directed to do so”? No.
I believe that those officials simply made mistakes and were not making or missing any calls with any sort of motivation behind those mistakes. I have said here before that I spent a lot of spare time officiating basketball when I was younger. There is an important adage that all officials have been told and all officials have come to accept:
- There are two kinds of referees; those who have made mistakes and those who are just about to.
The Trilateral Commission have not joined forces with the Illuminati to rig NFL games. I am sorry if the team you root for or bet on did not win or cover “on any given Sunday”, but that is not because the game was rigged; it was because your team lost/did not cover.
Finally, George Orwell once offered a parallel to Hanlon’s Razor (above) when writing an essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer:
“In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless …’”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………