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July 25 - As a sports handicapper NBA betting is my bread and butter six months of the year. NBA gambling is certainly not for the faint of heart. It is a tough way to make an honest living at the best of times because the contest to beat the spread and the contest to win the actual game tend to be very different. Furthermore, the assumption is that everyone concerned with the latter has no concern for the former.
News that a top NBA referee, Tim Donaghy, a guy who officiated 20 playoff games and 772 regular season games, was shaving points and altering results in order to pay off gambling debts to the mob, comes straight out of the Sopranos. It also casts a gigantic pall over the NBA.
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We'll never know all the games that he fixed, tried to fix, or managed to taint. But here's one for starters: Miami Heat at the New York Knicks in New York in February. Knicks are mediocre but favored by 4.5 points. Wiseguys think that the Heat should get the cover because they're the defending NBA champions and everyone who knows a little bit about the NBA knows that the Knicks stink.
The final result for the game is a Knicks win by 6 points. Good for them. The stat that is interesting? Knicks shoot 39 times from the free throw line, and the Heat get to go to the charity stripe exactly 8 times. That's a differential of 31 and assuming 70% of them are made, that should give the Knicks an extra 21 points in the bag.
Tim Donaghy worked that game. Did he shave points to help the Knicks cover the spread? Who can say for sure, but it's a game that is now tainted in my mind and should be a red-flag for those FBI investigators.
For those of you who haven't followed the whole story this was a guy with a gambling problem, and there is evidence that the NBA knew he had a gambling problem. Instead of firing him they let him work in this year's playoffs. They had no proof he was gambling on the NBA, had fallen in with the mob, owed those guys money, and paid them back with some favors.
Now I know that a lot of NBA guys have huge gambling problems. Sir Charles, Patrick Ewing, and who knows how many of the current players. It is a little childish and short-sighted to think that a player who owes big will not follow the same path as this referee. And who knows how many other officials are involved?
Interestingly, Vegas bookies had no idea about this guy, which means there weren't big betting moves to tip off that the fix was in. We will update this story as soon as more info comes to light, but it is a sad day for sports betting and a good day for those of us who had nothing to write about after the screen went black for Tony.
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