Did anyone else see that little blurb in the paper last week about 6 NBA officials being disciplined for gambling infractions? Thought not. Hell I almost missed and oddly enough I can no longer find the link to the article on FARK.com(although CBC.ca still has an article on it). The NBA has said it is in not way related to the Tim Donaghy investigation and the are all separate. OK, so why won't you tell us who they are and how they were punished? The six remain anonymous, as do the exact substance of the rules they broke. Where did they go, what did they bet on? Did they dig themselves into a hole? Do they owe the wrong people money? All are legitimate questions and none have been answered. Hell I haven't even seen an official statement from David Stern on the matter.
As I stated in an earlier entry regarding Donaghy, it's obvious Stern is trying to hide a few things. He waited until the summer to drop the Donaghy story and now he very quietly drops this bombshell during the baseball playoffs and the middle of the NFL season. There wasn't even an press release, just a source telling the New York Daily News what had transpired. I find myself thinking back to Sterns calling Donaghy a "single, rogue official" and saying oh really? Well at last count the NBA had a sixty man referee staff, meaning at last one tenth of them broke the rules.
Something tells me the infractions of these six officials go farther back then the summer. With the massive fallout from the game fixing scandal I highly doubt these men decided to hit Vegas during the summer thinking nothing bad could happen. It is also interesting that we do not even know how these six were caught. Did someone see them hitting the Strip, or were they tipped off? After all, Donaghy did set himself up with a lawyer that specializes in cutting deals for information, and it was reported he was preparing to name other officials on similar gambling offenses. The question was asked often and early when the scandal broke, is Tim Donaghy just the tip of the iceberg?
So here we stand now with the NBA very quietly trying to punish six more officials for breaking the rules and gambling(whether the establishments are legal or not). If not for a source within the front offices we wouldn't even know about it. What does this tell us then? Simple, that the problem is larger then Stern let on. If it wasn't he wouldn't be trying to pull a David Copperfield by using the World Series and the NFL as a puff of smoke and flash of light while he drops six men through a trap door hidden by a bunch of show girls. If the problem of officials gambling is minimal why the secrecy? One would assume he'd be out in public saying "Look what I have done". Hell, with Roger Goodell playing Wyatt Earp in the NFL you'd think he'd follow Gary Bettmans lead and jump on those coat tails.
Obviously this is merely speculation, as we have no hard facts at this point, but it doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to put the facts together. Stern told us Donaghy was isolated. Donaghy got himself a smart lawyer who knows how to cut deals. Nothing happened all summer, then six referees are called to the carpet far from the public eye. One or two I could understand, but six all at once? That doesn't tell me there were individual investigations, that tells me someone talked. Maybe it was Donaghy, or maybe it was another referee trying to dodge a bullet. Whatever the truth is, Stern had better come forward and tell us, because I'm not going to have my intelligence insulted by this man any more.
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