The Portland Trail Blazers are 8-3 on the young season, but not everything is rosy in Rip City. Despite the victories, people have beef…not with the team so much, but the folks who run alongside them. Check out this interesting submission to the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag, redacted somewhat for public-facing language:
Dave,
I watched both Thunder games and my question is why the refs can’t get a call right. It was so obvious every time [Isaiah Hartenstein] was driving or going for a rebound that he was fouling
underneath and throwing off our players. Don’t even talk about the favoritism [Shai Gilgeous-Alexander] gets. I know OKC is a favorite in the conference but it feels like the refs are making favorites instead of calling the game fairly. If we got calls like that I bet we’d be elite too. Will we ever get a break or are we stuck up here as a team nobody knows that will always get the worst end of the calls?
J
You will indeed get stuck with the worst end of the calls for the entirety of your NBA fandom. It’s guaranteed. Every fan automatically receives the worst calls for their team because every fan in the universe perceives that his or her team is specially singled out to get them.
Last night I watched the Oklahoma City Thunder feed for the game. The commentators were completely distracted with how awful the refereeing was against OKC. That’s in the same game you were convinced was going against the Blazers. They spent as long discussing it as Portland commentator Lamar Hurd spent talking about Robert Williams III sleeping at the Moda Center overnight. And they’re trained professionals.
The beautiful thing about the bias—I don’t mean that word negatively, everyone has them—is that it will always be confirmed. Calls will go against your team. Some of them will be bad. Those incorrect calls will be highlighted disproportionately. You can go to the market a thousand times to buy a banana. The one time the teller returns incorrect change to you will stick in your mind far more than the 999 times they did it flawlessly. You’re going to carry that memory with you even though it encompasses .1% of actual transactions. Then when it happens again it’ll be twice. A third time will be enough to convince you that there’s a pattern of incorrect counting even if—mathematically and in your own experience—the dominant pattern is actually everything going right.
That’s how the minds of human beings work. We are literally rigged to identify patterns, then point out and remember the differences, especially if those differences seem hostile to us. That’s what allowed our ancient anscestors to walk through a forest saying, “Tree…who cares? Tree…who cares? Tree…who cares? TIGER! RUNNNN!” The trees are way more numerous than the tigers, but the tigers matter to us more, so we retain and operate on the memory of them in a stronger way. If ever there were people who would be totally fine with NBA refereeing, they never made it this far. They all got eaten by wildlife before the league even formed.
By now you have seen approximately 10,000 really bad calls against the Blazers. That those come from a body of 100,000,000 total whistles doesn’t matter. 10,000 times is more than enough to prove a pattern. And once you have that pattern in mind, you’re going to see it every time it happens.
What’s more, you don’t see this same pattern with other teams. You haven’t witnessed anywhere close to 10,000 bad calls against the Lakers. Why? Because you only see them 3-4 times a year. You see your own team 82 plus playoffs. That means, at best, against your most familiar opposition, you will perceive maybe 5% of the bad calls you witness against your own team. That’s 1/20 of the number of poor whistles…not even worth noting comparatively! The refs are never as biased against the opponent as they are against your guys.
What’s worse, bad calls against other teams don’t hurt you. They actually favor you. That means…
- They’re not going to trigger the “danger…TIGER!” signal in your brain. You’re going to forget them quicker.
- Since they bias towards your aim, you’re a lot more likely to justify them retroactively as correct. This is the same mechanism nepo babies use to convince themselves that they’re “self made” after their parents give them $5 million seed money to start out life with. That judgment call the refs made for the Blazers wasn’t wrong. And even if it was, it’s just make-up for the other 18 unfair whistles that haven’t been balanced out yet! Your team has to fight for every success while the other guys get handed them on a silver (or ref-gray) platter.
Add this all up and you get a system wherein every observer will perceive a massive bias against their own interests and a corresponding favoritism towards the opponent, if nothing else through lack of that same negative bias. The only difference will be the language used to reason it out.
“Refs blow whistles against us because we’re Portland, a nothing team to the league.”
“Refs blow whistles against US because we’re the Lakers and everybody hates us!”
“Refs blow whistles against us because we’re the Thunder and we’re just that good. They want parity, not dynasties!”
Three caveats mitigate all this.
First, the league has been biased in years past. Anyone who watched Shaquille O’Neal and the Lakers back at the turn of the millenium can pretty much attest to that. But it’s worth noting that even then, Shaq was claiming that refs weren’t calling nearly every foul that opponents committed against him. And that’s when he was the poster child for favoritism!
Real bias can happen. It’s just rarer than you think. It’s also a serious legal matter, not just a casual complaining thing. And the whole time, recipients of it will claim it isn’t happening just like everyone else claims. That makes it hard to sort out short of an independent, professional investigation.
Second, the basketball court is so spread out, the action so fast, and the defense so restricted in this day and age that judgment calls rule the day. So little is set in cement anymore. If it looks like a foul, it might be one. Almost any brush of contact can be. But other brushes might not be. Which leaves every call in the purview of the observer. That’s ripe breeding ground for (justified) complaints.
Finally, thank goodness you have Deni Avdija now, Trail Blazers fans. He drives so often, with such size, speed, and momentum, that he’s a whistle magnet. As long as Deni runs your offense, other fans will have more reason to complain about the refs than you will. To wit: in the two-game series with the Thunder, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on the other side, the Blazers shot a near-identical number of foul shots to Oklahoma City. Not all of that was Deni, but he’s as powerful of a force as Shai on many nights, so this is going to go your way.
With all that in mind, have at it! Complaining about referees is a time-honored tradition in sports. Nothing will change it. It doesn’t really need to be changed as long as it’s a fun part of the conversation instead of the dominant factor in it.
Thanks for the question! You all can send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!
