Friday, July 29, 2011

[RANDOM] Giving NBA referees their due

One of my biggest peeves with sports fans are their complete disregard for the difficulty of being a ref or an umpire in professional sports. They have an extremely hard task that demands perfection and they very nearly get it all the time. Playoff refs are actually chosen based on their number of mistakes during the regular season (for NBA and the NFL, at least. I assume it's the same for other sports). There is a relentless review of their work after every game and each referee is criticized and trained throughout their careers to become better.

They could get 99% of their calls right, and yet they still get lambasted when they make one wrong call.

A great passage I read from Peter Post summed up my feeling towards the matter well. Paraphrased, it was something along the lines of, "Never blame the ref for one bad call that costs you the game. Chances are your team made at least one mistake along the way, so you should instead lament all your missed opportunities that would have won it for you."

At any rate, here's a fantastic article from ESPN where the writer spends a day hanging out with NBA referees at work and has some very interesting and insightful comments.

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