Even though every moron and his brother has seen fit to weigh in on the NBA officiating scandal, I still want to put in my two cents. There are aspects of this story that surprised the hell out of just about every American fan. It sort of reminded me of the famous scene from Casablanca where Claude Rains as Captain Renault (the prefect of police) shuts down Rick's under orders from the Germans. The pretext he used is that there was illicit gambling going on in the bar. And as he is claiming to be shocked at that fact, the croupier walks up to him and hands him his winnings.

As a nation of sports fans, we have exhibited the same basic reaction as Captain Renault. We have the nerve to be shocked by this story when we ought to come out and admit that we're really surprised that it has taken this long for an official in one of our major sports to be implicated in a mess like this, or we would be if we weren't so monumentally naive. Officials don't make a lot of money and they have a pretty thankless job. I'm surprised only one of them has allegedly been fixing games.

Another thing that surprised me was Mark Cuban's response to this situation. I would have bet money that he'd have come out in his blog whining about the number of Mavs games Ted Donaghy reffed which featured questionable or controversial calls. Perhaps I was blinded by my hatred. To his credit, the Benefactor came out with a shockingly moderate response and provided a vote of confidence for the league office. I don't agree with him, but I found it to be a not entirely unpleasant surprise.

I don't want us to lose sight of the real victim here. Poor Bill Simmons is now dangerously close to experiencing an identity crisis of epic proportions. For 6 years now, he has managed to walk the fine line between being a wholly owned subsidiary of David Stern and daring to come out of the Commissioner's pocket once in a great while to criticize the league. Now he might have to pick a side, and it might hurt him a little bit.

When I discuss basketball in this space, I think I have made it explicit that I am not impressed with David Stern. He got to where he is today by stabbing his boss in the back. The NBA is falling down around his ears, and the most proactive solution he could come up with is a player dress code. But people claim he's the best commissioner in professional sports today?

The NFL gets better and stronger with each passing year. Their players get involved in ugly off-field incidents and the league comes down with a new player conduct policy. I'm still not a fan of it, but it's a genuine response. Pro basketball players fire into the air outside the strippie, enter the stands to accost and/or assault paying customers and the ratings decline year in and year out, but they have a fancy dress code.

Am I missing something here? Do I need to start smoking dope? How does any sane person look at that and think David Stern is the best commissioner in sports today? So what if the NBA runs a tighter ship than hockey or baseball? Is the constant struggle to attain mediocrity now what a person ought to aspire to?

Here's a thought: maybe David Stern should have been wondering whether one of his officials might have had a gambling problem. Maybe the Commish should have considered the possibility that an official with an alleged gambling problem might possibly come under the thumb of organized crime figures. And maybe one of his officials with an alleged gambling problem and alleged ties to alleged organized crime figures might allegedly take a hand in altering the outcome of games in which he was officiating.

Unless one can solve that problem with a new dress code, Stern could be in a little bit of trouble on this one. I think he might want to put the World's #1 Sports Commissioner mug on the back shelf for a little while. Before I leave this topic, I want to ask a rhetorical question. Every year the NBA playoffs seem to get worse from a fan standpoint. Is it a coincidence that the NBA championship trophy is the Larry O'Brien trophy and said O'Brien is the boss who was stabbed in the back by David Stern?

In other news, Jon Lester was impressive in his debut. And I don't really care. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that his cancer is in remission. It's just that I wish him good health but professional failure. Also, it doesn't help that I hate the Indians. I had a hard time summoning up the energy to root for them tonight.

Finally, while my people seem to have hit a roadblock in advancing my candidacy for President of Red Sox Nation, it won't stop me from ripping Bill Simmons again tonight. I forgot to mention last week when I linked to his podcast addressing his flap with the Remdawg, Bill Simmons managed to make himself the dean of the Max Mercy Hall of Fame.

Simmons said that he wasn't going to feud with Jerry Remy because he didn't feud with second basemen with a lifetime OPS of less than .660. Which is a pretty damning insult coming from Bill Simmons. Out of curiosity, I went to Baseball Reference to set up one of their statistical comparisons to see what the Sports Guy's lifetime OPS was. And the damnedest thing happened. The comparison engine didn't work. It took me a while to figure out why. Then I realized Simmons never played the game.

Julian Tavarez is a lucky man. On a day when I ought to be focusing most of my energy denouncing him for being a complete buffoon, I must waste some time attacking some bozo from Cornell and a possibly even bigger bozo from the University of Pennsylvania. A study has been released in the New York Times, on the front page of the "Paper of Record" claiming to prove that white referees call more fouls on black players than they call on white players in the NBA these days.

This is surprisingly irresponsible sensationalism on the part of the New York Times. Unfortunately, it is also the kind of sensationalism that will most likely assure tenure for all those involved in the "research." Looking at their methodology, as it is articulated in the Times, leaves me unimpressed. As the Times piece presents it, here is how the study was conducted:

"To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data."

As far as I can tell, the people who did this study read newspaper box scores and learned everything there was to learn about everything pertaining to officiating a professional basketball game. Leaving aside for a moment that no box score I've ever seen tells which official called what foul on which player for what offense, and in fact does little more than relate the number of fouls called on a given player in a given game, the real problem is that it massively simplifies a complicated, fluid event like a basketball game and tries to shoehorn it into an academic setting.

What exactly does comparing players' positions tell you, for instance? Look at a power forward like Elton Brand, who is one of the last guys at that position that plays with his back to the basket and doesn't prefer to be a perimeter guy. Shouldn't he then be more likely to be called for charges than Dirk Nowitzki who makes his living shooting more outside jumpers than make moves in the low post?

This study purports to detect a bias in NBA officiating, but what it reveals about its authors is more interesting than its specious results. There is a certain overly sensitive impulse to detect a bias that may not, in fact, exist. After all, the majority of white NBA players in this day and age seem to be perimeter guys, players looking to shoot jumpers rather than drive to the hole. They also seem to be shakier defenders, more likely to be concealed in a team's defensive scheme rather than given difficult assignments.

The study doesn't take into account the million subtle factors that have a ton of influence over how games are played over the course of an 82 game season and a marathon playoff run. For instance, how did long road trips impact the way teams played in these games? Were officiating patterns at all effected by teams showing fatigue in the second of back-to-back games? Were players playing hurt more likely to commit fouls than players who were fresh and healthy? Did particular teams or particular players have more fouls in games against particular rivals?

Then there is the fact that none of the three experts brought in by the Times to review the data and compare it to a package the league offered to defend itself was a basketball man. No officials, no players, just academics. With ten human beings battling for 48 minutes to put a round ball through a round hoop on a confined court watched over by three people who are supposed to be impartial, there is a hell of a lot going on on the court during any given NBA game.

Reviewing box scores compiled over a fourteen season span is not sufficient to get an accurate picture of what happened in each game. As Charles Barkley said on the Dan Patrick Show today, it's asinine. Even worse, it's academically irresponsible. They have a study on basketball written by a business professor and an economics grad student who never played the game, reviewed by economists and statisticians. Was there even a chaos theory expert among them?

Basketball is a complex and dynamic system, after all. It makes me a little sick to my stomach that this is treated as though it were legitimate scholarly research and not blind guesswork. But now it's time to get to the real point of tonight's post.

Julian Tavarez has a lot to say on the possible return of Roger Clemens to the Boston Red Sox. None of it is particularly pleasant, or insightful, but it is entertaining from my perspective. The first problem, as you might expect, is that Tavarez hasn't listened to the CHB reminding us that Clemens is tied at the top of the team's career wins list with the legendary Cy Young whenever he appears on TV or the radio. I am still surprised that that revelation did not inspire Clemens to offer to pay John Henry for the privilege of surpassing Cy Young. But that's neither here, nor there.

Julian Tavarez says that the Red Sox are set in the rotation, they have no need for Roger Clemens. None of this is motivated by the fact that Tavarez would be the odd man out in the Red Sox rotation. Instead, it is the product of one of the few keen and penetrating baseball minds of this generation. If the current rotation cannot shoulder the load this season, reinforcements are already available in Pawtucket in the form of Kaisson Gabbard and Jon Lester.

Of course any fan who would prefer Clemens over those two fora stretch run this season is crazy. Twenty years from now, Lester and Gabbard will both have won so many games that no one will speak of Clemens and his paltry 341 victories. I don't know who would dare question Tavarez's perception and ability to evaluate talent, so I accepted it without complaint when he predicted that Jon Lester will be the second coming of Sandy Koufax for all of about 13 seconds.

Sandy Koufax? Just because he's a lefty doesn't make him the next Koufax. It might be smart to set the bar a little lower than the best left handed pitcher of the last 50 years for a young pitcher who really hasn't been tested in the Major Leagues yet. At least that way if he fails, it might not be as hard to accept in the end.