An Open Letter to the National Basketball Association calling for better regulated games

[Note that I wrote this for a writing class back in January 2018, so some of the events here might be outdated]

Dear Commissioner Adam Silver and all NBA refs,

I am a huge basketball fan, and have been for as long as I could remember. I spend a good portion of my time every day watching NBA games and dwelling on online discussion forums ravaging for the latest news in the league. Don’t get me wrong, I love the entertainment values and the excitement you guys provide for the audience, but at times, it gets frustrating when you have to watch James Harden shoot a free throw every 5 seconds, or Lebron James not getting any favorable calls he deserves, when guys are literally ganging up on him down low. This deficient officiating needs to be stopped.

They ruin the flow of the game.

They ruin our viewing experience.

They ruin a hardworking team’s chance to win a title they deserve.

In short, please STOP FIXING games! I understand that the NBA is still a business, and a business’s sole aim is to maximize its profit, and by extending playoffs series and artificially creating rivalries between teams, you bring in more views and thus, more money. But please… consider your viewers, your fans, your customers. You are selling them lies and a flawed sense of pride when their favorite team (and the referees) “accomplishes” a feat they shouldn’t have been able to. You are making the players frustrated whenever a referee just straight-out denies their request to review his/her call. You are denying a team of a chance to prove what they truly worth.

The league this season has been riddled with numerous bad calls: Corey Brewer’s “phantom foul” on James Harden’s three point shot this December, Giannis Antetokounmpo’s out-of-bound “game winner” over the Thunders, and the random ejections of superstar players like Lebron James, Anthony Davis, and Kevin Durant in the span of one week. Historically, bad calls have been a prevalent problem in the NBA; we have been tolerating it for years, but it is just progressively getting worse. And you guys are making it obvious as well!

Let’s look closer at the Lakers-vs-Rockets game on December 20, 2017. In this game, Lakers’s Corey Brewer was charged with a shooting foul as he attempted to defend Rocket’s superstar James Harden’s three-point shot. According your own rule book, the offended team is “charged with a team foul if the illegal contact was caused by the defender… and the offensive player is in the act of shooting” [1]. Note the word “contact” here. As defined by Dictionary.com, a “contact” is “the act or state of physical touching”, but as the Video Replay clearly showed, Corey Brewer never actually committed such act; his hand was roughly half a foot away from Harden. Nevertheless, Brewer was still charged with a shooting foul, thus sparking the sport analyst’s coinage of the term “phantom foul”. Although the Lakers ended up winning the game, James Harden did also stuff his stats sheet with a monstrous 51 points performance, 17 of which came from a total of 21 free throws attempted!

On the other side, rookie Kyle Kuzma who were granted the most free throws on the Lakers only shot 10 in total, 7 of which he made! This massive difference is absurd and whenever such an incident happens, it spells F-I-S-H-Y!

However, I am willing to give you guys a slight pass for what happened. Perhaps this is just simply a bad call. Referees are human, after all. As human, they make mistakes. However, when it comes Giannis Antetokounmpo’s “game winner” over the Oklahoma City Thunders, you guys made it clear that how desperate you were for the Milwaukee Bucks to win. As the clock gets down to only 1.3s left, Giannis, staying true to his “Greek Freak” title, drove past Josh Huestis of the Thunders, and completely dehumanized Thunders’ superstar Russel Westbrook with a monster posterizer Yes, as heroic and adrenaline-inducing that play was, everyone could clearly see that Antetokounmpo’s left foot was way out of bound! What made it even worse was that there was a referee RIGHT THERE watching it happened! And by “right there”, I mean he was literally just a foot away!

As we all know, no call was made. The Milwaukee Bucks escaped the game as winners, while Russel Westbrook watched his supposed victory being stolen away. When asked why no review was conducted, NBA referee Derrick Stafford commented “In any reviewable matter, there has to be a whistle called on the floor. There was no whistle blown for the play, so we couldn’t review it.”

Oh come on…

The NBA is rigged, there is no doubt about it, but when the playoffs arrive, the transparency of how fixed certain games can be gets ridiculously clear. Throughout history, there have been many highly questionable games, but perhaps the poster child has to be the Lakers-vs-King series in the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals. In fact, the officiating in Game 6 was so questionable that even former Presidential candidate Ralph Nader called for a thorough investigation. In that game, the Lakers were granted 40 free throws compared to the Kings’ 25. What was even more suspicious was that in the fourth quarter alone, Los Angeles made 21 of 27 at the charity stripe while Sacramento only shot 7 of 9.

The fact that both Kings’ key players Vlade Divac and Scot Pollard were fouled out really early, adds even more into the already brewing suspicion. This left the proper defensive force to guard Lakers’ legend Shaquille O’Neal, also known as the Diesel for his brute strength and massive size. As the result, the Kings were completely obliterated inside the paint. In addition, another foul was called against Kings’ Mike Bibby later in the game, after he was shoved and elbowed by Lakers’ Kobe Bryant, denying the Kings of a chance to tie the game. Watch it all happened here

In the end, the Lakers (along with the refs) won Game 6, and advanced to win the 2002 NBA championship.

Another series that still sickens me is the 2006 NBA Finals, especially from Games 3-6. It was just horrible! The NBA were desperate for a star, so they created one, in the names of Dwyane Wade. I have nothing against D Wade; I love him in fact. 12 times NBA All Star, 3 times NBA champions, 2008-2009 NBA Scoring Leader, and 3 times All Defensive team; this man’s accolades just go on and on. Prime D Wade was a monster, and everyone knows it. However, never in the history of any sport have I seen a group of officials trying to hand a championship to a player so desperately.

Throughout the 2006 NBA Finals, Dwyane Wade shot 97 free throws in six games. That is, on average, 16 FTs every game. In Game 5, he shot 25 free throws in total, the very same amount as the whole Dallas Mavericks team in total! If you argue that these absurd numbers are just coincidental, please explain how all these games were decided by three-point margin. Say whatever excuse you have, there was something funny going on, and the viewers know it. We are not blind to your ‘rhetoric’!

Rigged games have been a prominent part of the NBA. It happened many times in history, it happened last season, and it is going to happen again. Well, it doesn’t have to be this way. With all the evidence given, the NBA needs to improve its game-regulation. First, please amend the “no whistle, no review” rule. It is just absurd and does not make any sense. By allowing more plays to be reviewable, you will have more room to catch any unseen error and make the game fairer and more tolerable. Second, please add in a new rule that give players two “video-replay chances” each. It might sound counterproductive, due to the increase of potential interruptions to the game’s flow, but hear my logic out. If the players only have two chances to ‘complain’, or ask for play reviews, they would generally save those chances for plays that really matter, like those moments where they strongly believe the referees might have made a mistake. Indirectly, this new implementation can also alleviate another potential problem of players lying or deceptively exaggerating for a favorable call.

As a basketball fan, all I want to see is the game’s beauty in its purest and fairest form, undisturbed by any bias and external influence. I know to completely eliminate human bias in any decision can be challenging, but please, we need your help to make this right again. Do it for the players, do it for the fans, and do it for your own conscience. That is all I have to say

- Khai Lai