Image courtesy of ESPN.com
The Houston Rockets have conducted an “audit” of their game seven home loss to the Golden State Warriors in last year’s NBA Western Conference Finals. This just in: when an organization investigates its own outcomes, you can rest assured that it will not discover any wrong-doing on its part. See police investigating shootings of unarmed Black and Latino people.
I digress: The central “finding” was as follows: bad officiating in 81 separate instances produced about an 18-point swing. Since the Rockets lost by 9, it is their contention that, but for the bad refs, they would have beaten the Warriors and gone on to beat the Cavaliers to win the NBA title.
If you can stop laughing for just a minute, I would like to take an honest look at this.
There is actually a valid proposal in the Rockets’ memo to the league about this matter. That proposal is that seniority should not be the only factor in playoff assignments. The Rockets contend that call accuracy should also be considered.
They are right. Seniority and longevity alone are no more measures of credibility than J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI for nearly half-a-century is a measure of his commitment to justice.
This point is the only thing from this “audit” that should be taken seriously.
The remainder is flawed for two fundamental reasons:
- There is no accounting for how much the bad officiating went in favor of the Rockets. Even if not 81 instances, surely no one believes ALL the bad calls went the Warriors way. So, what would be the net point difference? We don’t know because the Rockets apparently were only interested in what went against them. It’s as if an accountant reviewing books only looked at deductions and ignored credits. Would anyone consider that to be a serious “audit”?; and
- The Rockets shot 7-44 from 3-point range, including missing 27 straight. That seems to me to be more of a case of violating the law of insanity, which is to continue doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Some have compared the Rockets’ fate to that of the 2002 Sacramento Kings, who lost the Western Conference Finals in seven games to my Lakers. I’ll cede that the Kings got the business in game 6 from the refs, if Kings fans and Lakers haters acknowledge that they loss game 1 and 7 at home and blew a 20-point lead in game 4. Bad refs had nothing to do with those facts.
What the Rockets are doing today and Kings fans have been doing for nearly 20 years now is really pretty common human behavior: the tendency to find an external cause of failure to avoid painful candid self-assessment.
This tendency goes well beyond the sports world.
The country’s current focus on immigration is an example. There are too many false narratives about the issue to address here but suffice it to say that a critical mass of Americans would rather blame their declining quality of life on external factors than the internal natural course of Capitalism.
Then there are the Russians and the 2016 elections. It is so much easier to blame them for the current White House occupant than it is to look at the Electoral College system, which is fundamentally undemocratic, or the simple fact that the Democrats ran a bad candidate.
Because the Democratic party gatekeepers refuse to engage in any serious candid self- assessment, they are in the process of propping up yet another Neo-Liberal centrist who has Trump chomping at the bit to face.
None of this is to say that there are not external roots in the failure of humans, both within and outside of sports. We would be naïve to believe that disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy was, or is, the only official that engaged in game-fixing. But such realities are factors to be considered in addition to candid self-assessment and not in lieu of candid self-assessment.
This is what the Rockets have failed to do, but they sure timed the release of their “audit” brilliantly, and I suspect the extra scrutiny just might benefit them to some degree.
But even if it does, if they fail to look in the mirror, neither bad refs nor the mighty Warriors are your primary problem.
