Off-hand, I can tell you Kirk Heinrich, Nick Collison, and Raef LaFrentz were born and raised in Iowa (and then all played for Kansas, the traitorous bastards). Paul Shirley. Scot Pollard. Fred Hoiberg (born and raised in Iowa, played for Iowa State) was in the league while the data was collected. And I don’t even follow the NBA!

But I can’t draw a conclusion of race being a factor in foul-calling unless the game footage was studied. What percentage was a legitimate call? How many legitimate fouls were uncalled? Do black players get called for more fouls because they commit more fouls? I don’t think it’s a far leap to wonder if the culture the player was raised in affects their style of play, because I’ve been watching it at Iowa State for years–the kids who spend hours alone on a farm shooting threes don’t play the same as the streetballers recruited from the Bronx.

Thanks,
Adrian

Anyway, the NBA has overreacted – this isn’t an attack on the NBA or the way it trains its officials. It isn’t an attack on anything, in fact. It’s an observation and, if the NBA had any sense, it would simply acknowledge that and pledge to continue to give its officials world-class training.

Referees (and anyone who has a job) need to spend some time in self-examination, making sure that they haven’t become tangled up in prejudice. But that should be done privately, and then referees can focus on what really matters out on the basketball court: calling a fair game.

Id rather see an in depth study that focuses star vs. rookie foul treatment, as well as seeing if a foul is legitimate or not. I think if a foul is a foul, race doesnt matter, but if blacks get whistled for more illegimate fouls, or vice versa, you then would have a real intersting study. I think this is a start, but you have to dig real deep to get a truer answer to this racial discussion.

Also, the results are mainly driven by the all-white and all-black ref squads (the latter being quite rare). Almost no difference between 2/1 and 1/2 squads. So there may also be a group solidarity factor at work. In which case, just trying to ensure there aren’t many single-race ref squads will fix the problem (to the extent there is one).

Table 3 has a good summary of a lot of this data.

Jason: whites have 17% of PT, according to the study.

I have to say that the magnitude of the impact on team wins seems much smaller than the authors claim. They focus on comparing a 0-white ref squad to a 3-white ref squad, the extremes. But let’s say the ‘correct’ percentage is 17% white refs (same as for players), a reduction of 51%. If we fired all those white refs and hired Black refs, that would mean an increase of about .09 fouls per game for each “additional” white player a team had, compared to its opponents. And let’s say there is a team that has 20% (1 player) more playing time for white players than average (a huge difference). So that team will now commit 7 more fouls per season, a cost of about 3-4 points. I forget what the point/win converter is for NBA, but it would take many seasons for this to translate into a singe additional win.

Now, the authors also say there is an impact on points, rebounds, etc., though it’s hard to tell how much, if at all, this involves “double counting” the impact of fouls. So there may be a more significant total impact on game outcomes. But in terms of fouls, the impact seems very small.

This is a fascinating study!

OK then, now that we’ve got that out of the way…

A couple of quick thoughts.

1. It would be interesting, but presumably not possible with just boxscore data, to break this down also according to the race of the foulee. I.e. black on black, white on white, white on black, black on white.

2. It would be interesting to see what the rates look like for all these International players who have come into the league in recent years.

3. Their data goes back a long way. I wonder how things look if you consider only, say, the last five years.

Well, OK, let me praise the study a bit more, or at least counter one potential criticism of it (the one the NBA is apparently hanging its hat on). One big criticism of this study is that it doesn’t take into account the identitiy of the referee who actually blew the whistle. It only takes into account the general composition of the crew (3W, 2W1B, 1W2B, or 3B).

Assuming they have appropriately controlled for all the relevant factors (which I can’t make a judgement on until I’ve seen the paper), this study finds a significant tendency for, e.g., a 2W1B crew to call more fouls against blacks than a 1W2B crew. The natural conclusion, then, is that white officials are slightly more likely to call fouls against black players than against white players.

It seems to me that, if that’s not the case, then the only way they could have gotten the results they did was if white refs were more likely to call fouls against whites when their officiating partners were black than when their officiating partners were white. That would be an equally interesting result, if not moreso.