Joey Crawford had no backup plan.
He would watch Philadelphia 76ers games in the 1960s, and probably unlike most kids growing up in that area around that time he had no aspirations of becoming the next Wilt Chamberlain or Billy Cunningham.
Crawford was the son of a baseball umpire — Shag Crawford worked in the National League for about 20 years. And that's why, when watching basketball, Joey Crawford was drawn to the referees. It was the family business.
“My father was a pro and he would be pointing out Mendy Rudolph, Richie Powers, Earl Strom," Crawford said, referring to some of the game's most prominent referees of that era. “I’d just be watching them. And my father, he's hitting me with the sledgehammer: ‘You’re not gonna play professional baseball, you're not gonna play professional baseball.' He wasn’t going to let me be that guy. So, I just earmarked refereeing.”
He was 13 years old. His mind was made up. Refereeing would be his path.
Little did he know it would take him to the Hall of Fame.
More than a decade after his final NBA game, Crawford is getting enshrined in this year's Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame class. The Hall is reserved for the best of the best, the elite, and for referees the club is especially elite — with fewer than two dozen people getting enshrined because of their work with whistles.
“With Joey, especially if you were away from home, you had a chance to win,” said longtime NBA coach Mike D'Antoni, another member of the Hall's Class of 2026. “He was going to call the game the way it should be called, whether it’s home or away.”
Crawford's numbers are legendary: He officiated more than 2,500 regular-season games, nearly 400 more in the postseason and 50 of those were in the NBA Finals. He was a lightning rod for critics, doesn't deny that he had issues with his temper particularly in his earlier years, and wound up becoming one of the game's most beloved figures.
And he became a bit of a showman along the way, unafraid to put a funny personality on display. Doc Rivers, who is going into the Hall as part of this class as well, loves the story of how he was tasked with guarding a rookie named Michael Jordan in a game that Crawford was officiating.
Rivers argued that Jordan traveled.
“You didn’t give me that call when I was a rookie,” Rivers told him.
Crawford's response: “You were not that good.”
“It shut me up completely. I had nothing else to say," Rivers said. “I thought Joey was fantastic about understanding the room and the person he was dealing with and how to get out of a situation.”
Crawford remembers his final game — Nov. 8, 2015, Cleveland beating Indiana — not because of anything that happened on the court before he limped off in the third quarter, his long-problematic knees leaving him unable to finish, but rather for what happened in the referee locker room afterward.
“It was my last game. I knew it. Blew my leg out. And I knew I wasn’t going to ref again," Crawford said. “Richard Jefferson was on the Cavs. He knocked on the door and asked security if he could come in.
"He looked at me and said, ‘You’re done, aren't you?' I said I was and he says, 'You know, a lot of people hate you. But I tell a lot these players, everybody should have a Joe Crawford experience.' Every time I tell the story, I start to well up, because you come to the realization that everybody doesn’t hate you. And I’ve given people reasons to. I look back on them and I’m not fond of those times.”
Crawford was charged in a 1998 tax scandal involving airline tickets that he and other referees were accused of selling and not reporting the income. He wound up resigning, only to be reinstated by then-Commissioner David Stern. And in 2007, Crawford had a now-infamous incident with San Antonio star Tim Duncan — calling two technicals on the Spurs legend for laughing from the bench. That got him suspended.
Crawford always wondered if those things would keep him out of the hall. He now has his answer.
“The game is about the players," Crawford said. "I don’t care what anybody says, the players are the key to this. And I’m not taking the political line here. But if you’re a ref, which I am — I am a ref through and through — we know it's not about us. Our job is to get the play right. Technology has changed, the money has changed, but the job hasn't. But I hope, in my way, I helped make refereeing better.”
That's exactly what he did. Turns out, no backup plan was required.
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