Legalize It!

It appears that gambling among NBA referees is far more widespread... and far less serious... than many had feared.

ESPN's Chris Sheridan reports:

Stern said an internal review had found that all of the league's 56 referees violated the contractual prohibition against engaging in gambling, with more than half of them admitting to placing wagers in casinos. But Stern said none of the violations was major, and no referees had admitted to wagering in a sports book or with a bookie.

Emphasis mine. The "no referees had admitted to wagering with a bookie" part is sort of amusing, no? Was the league really expecting a lot of refs to step up and cop to placing bets with Chris Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts behind the Bada Bing?

But anyway... it seems like the league has come up with a remarkably simple solution to the problem. They're going to re-write the policy on gambling to allow referees the same leeway as players, coaches and officials. Which means no one is going to get fired for placing a side bet on a golf game or playing a few hands of blackjack at Mohegan Sun.

(Hmm... an outright ban doesn't work, so legalize it. Where have I heard that argument before?)

Five Men Out

Interesting take on the NBA point-shaving case from The Wages of Wins. Their very well-reasoned point: the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series (chronicled in the excellent movie and even better book Eight Men Out) didn't actually hurt baseball attendance any.

I'll buy that. But is it really an apt comparison?

After all, the public didn't even learn about the Black Sox until the next year. At the time, baseball didn't have one-one-hundredth the competition for an entertainment dollar that the NBA faces today. And just a year or two after the Black Sox, baseball's popularity exploded due to the emergence of a certain larger-than-life outfielder who played his home games in the Bronx and hit a lot of home runs.

A more apt comparison comes from TrueHoop, which discusses the last time NBA figures were implicated in point shaving. Yikes. Between that and the CCNY scandal, I'm getting the impression that basketball in the '50s was more staged than a Broadway musical.