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DutheDoduhon21
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2943095

what if he bet on games bulls played? do you think it could have cost us, for example losing to the nets and costing us the 2nd seed??
madisonsmadhouse
God only knows.... It will be interesting to see who the official is, and which important/controversial games he worked.
Balta1701-B
Given how many close calls there are in so many games, there are probably hundreds each season where a ref being bought could have made the difference.
DutheDoduhon21
the referee is Tim Donaghy, has been officiating for 13 years.
madisonsmadhouse
So is there anywhere that has a list of the games this guy has done over the years?
rangercal
QUOTE (madisonsmadhouse @ Jul 20 2007, 08:04 PM) *
So is there anywhere that has a list of the games this guy has done over the years?

This is all I can find for now

Age: 40
NBA experience: Referee in 772 regular-season games in 13 seasons
2005-06 season: 63 games; team officiated most often -- Trail Blazers (7 games)
2006-07 season: 68 games; team officiated most often -- Heat and 76ers (8 games)
High school: Cardinal O'Hara (Springfield, Pa.; one of four NBA refs to attend O'Hara)
College: Villanova, 1989
Of note: In his first dozen seasons as an NBA referee, worked 704 regular-season games and 15 playoffs ... Also has seven years of CBA officiating experience ... Played varsity baseball at Villanova ... Participated in the NBA Read to Achieve program.
Balta1701-B
A few notables.

LA Times piece:
QUOTE
Donaghy was one of three referees who worked the infamous NBA game between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers in November 2004, in which nine players were suspended for a skirmish between the teams that escalated into a brawl with fans in Auburn Hills, Mich.


Tribune:
QUOTE
Donaghy, 40, has officiated 772 regular-season games over 13 seasons. One of four NBA officials to attend Cardinal O'Hara High School in suburban Philadelphia, Donaghy worked 68 regular-season games last season, including four Bulls games.

Donaghy also worked five playoff games, none in the conference finals or NBA Finals.

AP:
QUOTE
Donaghy, who reportedly has resigned, was an NBA official for 13 years. He officiated 68 games in the 2005-06 season and 63 games in 2006-07, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. He also worked 20 playoff games, including five last season - Pistons-Magic on April 23; Warriors-Mavericks on April 27; Suns-Lakers on April 29; Nets-Raptors on May 4; and Spurs-Suns on May 12.

Those studying Donaghy's games might have noticed some trends.

When the home team was favored by 0-4½ points, it went 5-12 against the spread in games officiated by Donaghy this season, according to Covers.com, a Web site that tracks referee trends. Home underdogs were 1-7 against the spread when it was 5-9.5 points.

Donaghy was part of a crew working the Heat-Knicks game in New York in February when the Knicks shot 39 free throws to the Heat's eight, technical fouls were called on Heat coach Pat Riley and assistant Ron Rothstein, and the Knicks won by six. New York was favored by 4½.
If he gave the Knicks an extra win, he cost us Greg Oden.
DutheDoduhon21
QUOTE
How mob hooked gambling ref
Posted: Saturday July 21, 2007 07:56AM ET
Tim Donaghy, the NBA ref at the center of a federal investigation into fixing games and betting on contests he officiated, was forced into helping crooked gamblers by a fledgling gangster who threatened him, The Post has learned. Donaghy was a troubled gambler who placed high-stakes bets on just about anything he could - including his own rounds of golf - before the Philadelphia-based wiseguy wannabe learned the ref bet on games that he worked, sources said. The thug's threats to expose Donaghy pressured the ref into feeding crooked gamblers privileged information that helped them win bets against the point spread - the margin of victory on which bettors wager - on NBA games, sources said. Donaghy also made officiating calls during games that affected margins of victory, the sources said.


QUOTE
Troubled ref had a reputation
Posted: Saturday July 21, 2007 07:39AM ET
On the court, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was known for his argumentative approach. He was on the floor when the brawl between the Pacers and Pistons occurred at The Palace of Auburn Hills in November 2004. Almost two years earlier, Donaghy was involved in a postgame confrontation with Rasheed Wallace. The incident stemmed from a technical foul Donaghy assessed Wallace, and resulted in Wallace receiving a seven-game suspension. Donaghy lived in the Philadelphia area until neighbors in West Chester accused him of harassment and invasion of privacy. In a lawsuit, neighbors accused Donaghy of stalking and vandalizing their property. Donaghy sold his home in 2005 and moved to Florida. According to the New York Post, Donaghy has a gambling problem and fell into debt while living on the East Coast.
madisonsmadhouse
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?i...e=ESPNHeadlines

QUOTE
Report: Florida authorities called to Donaghy's home
Associated Press

Updated: July 23, 2007, 7:44 AM ET
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NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who's being investigated by the FBI for betting on games he worked, had local lawmen at his Florida home Sunday because of threatening phone calls he's received, according to The New York Post.

Three squad cars from the Manatee County Sheriff's Office arrived at Donaghy's home in Bradenton, Fla.

"Our concern is for his safety and his family's safety," Sheriff's Lt. Robert McNealy told the newspaper for a story in Monday's editions. "We are definitely going to share any information we get with the FBI."

Authorities are examining whether the referee made calls to affect the point spread in games on which he or associates had wagered thousands of dollars over the past two seasons. Authorities say the referee had a gambling problem and was approached by low-level mob associates through an acquaintance.

The Daily News reported Sunday, citing unidentified law enforcement sources, that Donaghy will cooperate with authorities and possibly name other officials and players involved in the betting scandal.

On Monday, the newspaper reported that former neighbors of Donaghy's in Pennsylvania say they were approached more than a year ago by a private investigator they believed was hired by the NBA to check into Donaghy's gambling habits.

Kit Antsey, a real estate agent in West Chester, Pa., who helped Donaghy buy a home, told The Daily News a private investigator contacted him 18 months ago and asked him whether Donaghy bet on sports and at an Atlantic City casino.

However, The New York Times reported Monday, citing two unidentified people briefed on the investigation, that the NBA didn't know about Donaghy's betting or whether he affected the outcome of games until after the season.

The Times and The Daily News also reported NBA commissioner David Stern plans to speak publicly about Donaghy this week, maybe as soon as Monday.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press
b-riann
QUOTE (Balta1701-B @ Jul 21 2007, 01:48 PM) *
If he gave the Knicks an extra win, he cost us Greg Oden.

that SOB

even if not oden, it could of got us branden wright, yi, or durant
madisonsmadhouse
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/stor...e=ESPNHeadlines

QUOTE
NBA commissioner David Stern will field Tim Donaghy questions for the first time Tuesday. But we decided to pose and answer a few of our own as a side dish:

If Donaghy's bosses knew he had a gambling problem, why was he allowed to referee all the way into the playoffs last season?

This is the biggest mystery in the scandal so far ... or no lower than No. 2 behind the uneasiness that will linger indefinitely until the league can prove for sure that Donaghy is just "a single NBA referee" under suspicion alone, as described in a Stern statement Friday.

The problem?

It's a mystery partly because it remains unclear how much the NBA knew as of May 12, when Donaghy refereed what will be recorded as his final NBA game: Game 3 of the San Antonio-Phoenix playoff series.

The New York Times reported in Tuesday's editions that the league hired an outside firm in 2005 to investigate allegations that Donaghy was seen gambling in an Atlantic City casino. NBA refs are prohibited from any form of gambling and subject to termination if discovered, but those claims against Donaghy -- who was summoned to the league office as part of the inquiry -- could not be substantiated, according to the newspaper.

The newer and larger allegations, of course, have Donaghy betting on NBA games and doing so under the influence of organized crime figures, as discovered during an ongoing FBI investigation into mob activity. Yet there have been conflicting media reports in recent days regarding when the NBA learned of that FBI investigation, which might have been as early as January or as recently as last month.

Two sources close to the situation insisted to ESPN.com on Monday night that Donaghy's affinity for various forms of gambling -- if not specifically the claim that he was attempting to manipulate point spreads with his whistle the past two seasons -- was known in the league office for some time.

If so, Stern and his staff will have to absorb their own considerable slice of blame in this mess, having declined to strip Donaghy of his whistle months ago.

(One disclaimer, though: One source wondered aloud Monday whether the FBI might have insisted that the NBA let Donaghy keep working to preserve the larger sting operation, suggesting that suspending him before the playoffs would have cost them the crime-ring types originally being targeted. Interesting theory.)

If the NBA keeps such thorough data on every call and non-call referees make, as we're often told, why didn't Donaghy raise more suspicion during the season?

This mystery is right up there, too. Referees have been increasingly scrutinized by their bosses the past few seasons, most notably through pregame and postgame video review sessions. According to one of Stern's pet quotes, his referees are the "most ranked, rated, reviewed, statistically analyzed and mentored group of employees of any company in any place in the world."

Don't forget, furthermore, that Donaghy had two partners working in every game he did and joining him for those film sessions.

So it follows that a pattern of questionable calls should have been seen by someone, given that Donaghy was being monitored at varying degrees by his bosses, peers and the observers placed in the stands by the league at every game. How did no one notice missed or curious calls in various crunch times?

It also seems reasonable to expect that Donaghy would have attracted more than standard scrutiny, given the numbers compiled by Stats LLC, which told the New York Post that Donaghy's crew called 177 technical fouls last season -- 20 more than any other officiating crew -- also finishing fourth in most personal fouls called, third in awarding free throws and second in fouling out players.

However ...

Said one unnamed referee in a Boston Globe interview with ESPN contributor Jackie MacMullan: "I didn't work with [Donaghy] all that much, but I'm doing what everybody is doing now. I'm going back in my mind to the games we did work together. I'm trying to remember specific calls or particular discrepancies we might have had. I can't come up with anything.

"To be honest with you, I just can't get my head around it. We have certain protocols we follow in officiating a game. There's the start of the play, the development of the play and the finish of the play. You are required to carefully observe all three of them before you consider making a call. When you blow the whistle based on the development of the play and the finish of the play without seeing the start of the play, chances are you are going to make a bad call.

"Are there bad calls? All the time. Did he make some of them? Sure. None of us get it 100 percent right. Is there judgment in officiating? Of course. Human error? Of course. So how can any of us look at this and say, 'That's where he was altering the score'? It's too subtle. There are too many variables."

If Donaghy had a reputation as a bit of a hothead, as we're now hearing and reading daily, why wasn't he more well-known before last week?

Yet another mystery?

Afraid so.

Donaghy has never been one of the league's high-profile refs, but it's difficult to explain why not when you review some of his recent history. The 13-year veteran was on the floor when Indiana and Detroit engaged in their infamous brawl in November 2004 and later was blamed in some quarters for not doing enough to calm tensions. He also was involved in a postgame exchange in an arena loading dock with then-Portland forward Rasheed Wallace in 2003, resulting in a seven-game suspension for Wallace when Donaghy was physically threatened.

One colleague insists Donaghy was known at the league level as an undeniable "problem child" in spite of his relative anonymity because Donaghy also is said to have exchanged blows with fellow Philadelphia native Joey Crawford at a refs' meeting years ago.

ESPN's Stephen A. Smith, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted a players' association source this weekend as saying: "This is the same guy whom players invited to show up in the Bahamas for our annual meetings to discuss his attitude toward them, but it's never happened. He's disliked by a whole lot of people. He's viewed as a loner by other referees, separate from the pack. Still, absolutely no one assumed he would be involved with something like this. The entire NBA community has to be shocked."

If salaries were raised, would that reduce the possibility of referees being lured into the sort of activities Donaghy is accused of?

Referees make only a fraction of what NBA players earn, true, in a league in which the average player salary tops $5 million.

Yet it's a significant stretch to suggest they're all desperate for dollars -- even if you want to overstate things and make it sound as though fighting off such temptations is a common problem.

Entry-level referees are paid in the $85,000 area, according to league sources, but the overwhelming majority are six-figure earners. At the high end of the scale, salaries surpass $300,000.

It's believed that a referee with Donaghy's experience makes more than $200,000 annually, with extra cash coming in the playoffs.

The median wage and salary income in this country in 2005, according to U.S. Census data, was $34,926 for men and $23,546 for women.

If changes are coming to the league's referee structure, what should be expected?

This answer will get a lot longer as we get closer to October and more of the NBA's long-range plans are revealed. Yet rumblings in the referee community are already rampant that director of officials Ronnie Nunn and possibly even NBA executive vice president Stu Jackson will be sacrificed, given that Donaghy's off-court problems -- in his 13-year career -- apparently spiraled to such a dangerous degree on their watch.

Of course, even if the widespread calls for greater transparency in the NBA's officiating program and new administrative blood from the outside are heeded, it remains to be seen how independent any new entity overseeing officials actually will be.

What is the best-case scenario for the league at this point?

If you paid close to attention to Stern's statement Friday evening, in which he declared his determination to "bring to justice an individual who has betrayed the most sacred trust in professional sports," you undoubtedly have concluded that the league isn't quite expecting Donaghy's name to be cleared.

It would be a major victory for Stern at this point, frankly, if the league can prove conclusively that no other referees are involved. Ditto for any coaches, players and team officials, naturally.

Significant, unprecedented damage, as they say, already has been done to the NBA's integrity, That's damage to the public's faith in the league as a whole, which is a level of infamy perhaps not even Pete Rose can reach.

Conspiracy theories have plagued the NBA like no other U.S. sports league for more than two decades, most of them founded upon assumptions that Stern's office has orchestrated on- and off-court events to help his biggest stars and his teams from the biggest markets, presumably to score the most lucrative TV ratings.

Stern's response, in a 2004 interview with ESPN.com: "What can I say to that except, 'Come watch our games.' And so far, lots of people do. We're playing to close to 90 percent capacity.

"But I guess the more serious answer, and the one that usually gets people to stop and think, is that you realize that person is alleging at least a felony, probably a violation of both state and federal law, punishable by 20 years in a penitentiary. That's why it's also ludicrous, and that's why the media should be held a little bit more accountable for re-uttering the slander too easily by saying, 'People say.' ...

"But, really, we don't take it too seriously. It's really the result of coaches, to a degree, who have been trying to manipulate the media [by telling reporters], 'We lost ... the refereeing ... it's clear the league wants another [playoff] game ... the network wants New York in it.'"

The fear/inevitability now, however, is that Donaghy's alleged actions -- even though they don't come close to fitting the above profiles -- have invigorated and validated all those conspiracy theorists Stern has been scoffing at for years ... and with no way for the NBA to know how long it'll take to start winning back some of the public's confidence.

That uncertainty is considerable even if this is only a one-ref mess, which is why the best-case scenario is pretty ugly. Every game Donaghy officiated the past season-plus suddenly is being studied, doubted and worse.

So if anyone else is implicated with him ...

"[Donaghy is] going to hang over everything -- every referee, every shaky outcome, every bad call -- in ways the average fan doesn't fully realize yet," ESPN.com's Bill Simmons wrote in a weekend column.

"Maybe they'll throw Donaghy in jail, maybe they won't, but he'll linger over every court like a black cloud. You'll hear his name more than you think. You and your buddies will make 'That guy looks like he's pulling a Donaghy!' jokes every time a referee is making calls against your favorite team. Hecklers will gleefully play the Donaghy card after every bad call against the home team. For honest referees still working games, it doesn't matter what happens from this point on -- their collective integrity will always be questioned, their collective track record won't matter, and that will be that."

Marc Stein is the senior NBA writer for ESPN.com. To e-mail him, click here.
DutheDoduhon21
donaghy screwed bulls at least one time
QUOTE
How Donaghy worked system
Posted: Tuesday July 24, 2007 06:55AM ET
As FBI officials, the news media and fans pore over video footage of games refereed by Tim Donaghy, looking for curious foul calls and other such behavior, several seconds of a game between the Bulls and the Warriors in February could attract attention. The Bulls-Warriors game of Feb. 9, played at Golden State was tied, 112-112, with 23 seconds remaining. While a Bulls guard dribbled between midcourt and the 3-point shot line -- clearly working the clock down for an attempt at a final shot -- Warriors center Andris Biedrens stood in the lane without guarding anyone for about seven seconds, which is grounds for a defensive three-seconds violation. Donaghy, stationed behind Biedrens on the baseline, clearly stepped forward and tapped Biedrens on the waist with 16 seconds left. Biedrens, by then at the edge of the lane, then immediately moved clear of the paint, and play continued. The penalty for defensive three seconds is the assessment of a technical foul and retention of the ball. Golden State could have faced a 3- or 4-point deficit before getting the ball back.
dasox24
QUOTE (DutheDoduhon21 @ Jul 24 2007, 12:12 PM) *
donaghy screwed bulls at least one time

Oh wow... mad.gif

Though, we're not the only team he probably screwed. So, I'm not gonna complain too much. He probably did something or other to every team in the league.
rangercal
anyone thinking Vegas may not be getting that team any time soon?
b-riann
QUOTE (rangercal @ Jul 24 2007, 04:43 PM) *
anyone thinking Vegas may not be getting that team any time soon?

what?

and thats pretty weird with that bulls/warriors stuff. wow



their saying there were 3 games in which he refed that a guy made a free throw late in the game to cover the spread. the chances of that happening on accident is 1024 to 1
b-riann
QUOTE (DutheDoduhon21 @ Jul 20 2007, 02:35 PM) *
the referee is Tim Donaghy, has been officiating for 13 years.

how do u make that thing on the bottom of ur sig that says what u like and stuff? i saw someone on soxtalk had the same thing
urlacher1285
I truly think this incident is not going to hurt the NBA as much for what happened. The referee has not even been charged with anything.....yet. But you can point fingers and maybe make jokes about it. But I think this incident can and will be handled professional by David Stern. The Ben Wallace/Ron Artest fight fight.gif was way way worst than this. David Stern finds ways to make the NBA more enjoyable and I think we will be able to come out on top.


What do you guys honestly think is a worse position?

David Stern with the referee incident
Bud Selig with Steriod Bonds
Roger Goodell with Michael Vick electrocuting dogs.

Goodell is in the toughest position and I think Stern is in 2nd. But Stern can fix this, whereas Goodell can ban Vick for one year and PETA will still be complaining.

P.S. I want that SOB Vick out of the league, the thought of taking a dog, watering him down and electrocuting him makes me sick to my stomach.
rangercal
QUOTE (b-riann @ Jul 25 2007, 06:57 AM) *
what?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19877200/
madisonsmadhouse
QUOTE (rangercal @ Jul 24 2007, 04:43 PM) *
anyone thinking Vegas may not be getting that team any time soon?


Good point. Stern kept wanting to say being around betting shouldn't have any effect on anything, yet this is exactly how this guy got roped in. He gambled a bit and then started to lose a bunch, and pretty much got forced into doing something stupid. If you expose an entire franchise to that, not to mention the visiting teams and their hangers-on... It doesn't bode well for the NBA. Even if you somehow got the casino's to stop taking action on NBA games, there still is a ton of problems to be found.
b-riann
QUOTE (rangercal @ Jul 25 2007, 03:22 AM) *

i wonder what they would be called....
Balta1701-B
QUOTE (b-riann @ Jul 25 2007, 12:57 PM) *
i wonder what they would be called....

The Las Vegas Supersonics...
b-riann
QUOTE (Balta1701-B @ Jul 25 2007, 03:50 PM) *
The Las Vegas Supersonics...

lolhitting.gif
DutheDoduhon21
QUOTE
how do u make that thing on the bottom of ur sig that says what u like and stuff? i saw someone on soxtalk had the same thing


i dont remember what site i got it from but someone on soxtalk had a link to it.
SoxFan1
Donaghy did some Bulls games...
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