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Saturday, July 21, 2007

The NBA referee scandal -- any evidence yet?

An NBA referee is accused of manipulating games to come out on a certain side of the point spread. If that's true, it shouldn’t be too difficult to look at that referee's games and come up with the evidence. As Steven Levitt points out, maybe we should expect to be hearing from Justin Wolfers before long.

A thought: if this were baseball instead of basketball, would we have expected the evidence to have come out already? There are lots more sabermetricians in baseball than in basketball, and the existence of Retrosheet (which provides umpire data) would take care of the data-gathering step.

Regardless, I'd give pretty good odds that the amateur APBRmetricians will beat the academics to the punch on this one.

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