NBA's conspiracy factory

Each of the three major sports leagues in America has its own personality.  Baseball is . . . boring.  Bud Selig was a used car salesman from Milwaukee, and Rob Manfred hasn’t exactly been a boost in charisma.  Football is . . .  incompetent, run by a bumbling doofus who screwed up the Ray Rice investigation, screwed up the Deflategate investigation, and bollixed a number of other issues.  Basketball is . . . sneaky.

Maybe it dates back to the infamous “frozen envelope” that got the NY Knicks Patrick Ewing in the first NBA draft lottery.  Maybe it’s the constant drumbeat of teams conspiring to “game” the lottery by tanking.  Maybe it’s the fact that it is the only major American sport to have a referee found to be affecting the outcome of games.  Basketball always has to deal with conspiracy theories.

The latest, believed by (among others) disgraced referee Tim Donaghy, is that the league suspended Golden State Warriors’ player Draymond Green for game 5 of the NBA Finals in order to extend the series past 5 games.  Why do I believe this theory?  Three words—I’m from Sacramento.

You may have never heard of Sacramento; capital of the most populous state in America, stopping spot for people traveling from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, home of the Gold Rush in 1848.  Sacramento is also the victim in possibly the most widespread conspiracy theory in sports—that the NBA rigged the 2002 Western Conference Finals because they didn’t want the ratings nightmare that would ensue if the NBA Finals featured a team from Sacramento.

Sacramento had a 3-2 lead in the series.  Game 6 was played in Los Angeles.  The NBA assigned three refs to the game—who just happened to be a) the referee with the biggest reputation as a “homer” who favored the home team; b) the referee with the second biggest reputation as a “homer”; and c) the referee with the third biggest reputation as a “homer.”  Not surprisingly, a number of calls went against Sacramento in the fourth quarter and the Lakers came back to win in overtime.  The “erratic” refereeing persisted in game seven in Sacramento, and the glamorous LA Lakers advanced to the Finals.  The Kings have never been close to that good since (and despite being terrible for over a decade, Sacramento has never drafted higher than #3 and then only once; maybe the draft lottery is not above suspicion).

Fast forward to 2016.  In the Western Conference semi-final green kicked Oklahoma City Thunder player Steven Adams in what is euphemistically referred to as “the man zone.”  The foul was upgraded to a “flagrant foul” and Green was fined, but despite the, um, flagrancy of the offense Green was not suspended.  The Warriors came back from 3-1 down and won the series, eliminating a team that the NBA wants in a final maybe even less than Sacramento (memo to Kevin Durant: you won’t win a title until Oklahoma City is some place the NBA brass want to spend time in).

Fast forward again to the finals.  What looked, theoretically, like a classic matchup turned out to be a rout.  The Warriors crush the Cavs in three games, with only a hiccup in a home game in Cleveland preventing a sweep.  No game 6 and 7 means less advertising revenue for the NBA.  But what can stop the unstoppable Warriors?  Not LeBron James and the inept Cleveland Cavaliers.  But the league has more power than any team.

Green got tangled up with LeBron James on a play.  It was clean and no foul was called.  But the league decided that it was not a non-foul, but a foul, and then bootstrapped one more step and upgraded the foul (which wasn’t called by the refs) to a flagrant foul, even though the foul was so non-flagrant that no one saw it at the time, including the refs.  Green was suspended for game five, and to no one’s surprise the Cavs won.

Green has said if he had played in game 5 the series would be over, and he is right.  If the Cavs win game 6 at home they will force a deciding game 7 in Oakland, and the NBA will be richer.  Fans will get a game 7, and with a couple of lucky bounces (and with Andrew Bogut out) the Cavs could pull off a major upset and LeBron can bring a championship to Cleveland, despite the fact that the Warriors are a vastly superior team.

Is this conspiracy theory as far-fetched as the plot to kill JFK? Not really; the NBA had means, motive, and opportunity to influence events and extend the series.  That’s all they ever need on Law & Order.