King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The NBA dismisses a study that finds racial bias in its officiating, but it would be shocking if that finding were wrong. Plus: Suns vs. Spurs.
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May 3, 2007 | Alan Schwarz of the New York Times reports that a coming academic study of foul calls in the NBA reveals a slight but statistically significant racial bias.
The study, by Justin Wolfers, a University of Pennsylvania assistant professor of business and public policy, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found that from the 1992 to the 2004 seasons, white referees called fouls against black players at a greater rate than they called fouls against white players. Black referees called more fouls against white players than against blacks, the study says, but the tendency was not as strong.
The NBA denies it. Having received a draft of the study last year, the league conducted its own, smaller probe, looking at only two and a half years through the middle of this season.
But the NBA had the advantage of knowing which referee called each foul. Wolfers and Price, denied that information by the NBA and working from box scores, were only able to assess officials as three-man teams, basing their findings on whether the teams were majority or unanimously white or black.
"We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias," commissioner David Stern said.
Though the Wolfers-Price study has yet to undergo formal peer review, three independent experts interviewed by the Times, plus common sense and the sniff test, all say the study is more believable than Stern's pronouncement about the league's own findings.
Putting aside the league's self-interest in denying bias, Wolfers and Price used a much larger database of fouls and controlled for a huge number of variables, such as officials' different treatment of stars and rookies, players' roles and the different racial makeup of those who fill those roles -- for example: centers, who draw a lot of fouls, are disproportionately white -- home vs. road calls and so on. The league didn't.
"We find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2-4 percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three," Wolfers and Price write. They also report a decrease in effectiveness, as measured by various standard basketball stats, for players in games officiated by two or three referees of the other race, the Times reports.
"Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you'd win a few more games," Wolfers said. And sure enough, Wolfers and Price found that during the 13 seasons of their study, teams with the greater share of playing time by white players had a winning percentage of .514.
That might mean you have to be a better player to be white and get playing time in the NBA than you'd have to be if you were black. Even if that's true -- and again that seems counterintuitive based on what we know about the way the rest of the world works -- it doesn't discount the officiating-bias theory. Both could be true.