Only one of them?
For coach Jerry Sloan and the fans who protested every call that went against the Jazz during the eight home playoff games this past spring, this is all the evidence they needed to further their belief that NBA referees are corrupt and occasionally out to get their team.
In truth, this examination of Tim Donaghy's work is very reassuring.
The performance of NBA referees is far from perfect. Those guys are inconsistent, fallible and just plain mistaken at times. But consciously wrong, as a rule? No way.
It is actually comforting to know that it takes organized crime - even if, as The Associated Press described them, those supposedly involved with Donaghy were "low-level mob associates" - getting its hooks into an official with a big gambling problem for anything like what's alleged of Donaghy to happen.
You can just about bet that Sloan and other NBA coaches smirked and nodded in agreement when they heard about it. They probably could name several other refs they have suspected of having their own agendas on the court over the years. Same with a lot of Jazz fans, who know all their names and are suspicious of the motives of some of them.
NBA commissioner David Stern is disturbed by the investigation, and rightly so. If Stern has been concerned about anything during his 25 years on the job, it is the integrity of the game and everybody involved in it. By all appearances, Donaghy has greatly compromised that. Even if some of his calls were merely intended to manipulate scores in relation to the gambling point spread and not affect which team won or lost, that's disconcerting enough.
Weeding out Donaghy will solve the problem, I'm convinced. His case illustrates that NBA refs are like anyone else who can become lost amid financial problems and do the radically wrong thing in response, but he is an aberration.
The refs might miss a judgment call now and then, but they do not lack good judgment, period.
It is true that basketball, possibly more than other sports, lends itself to the potential of one member of an officiating crew influencing the final score for gambling-related reasons. For one thing, it is astounding how frequently the margin of victory falls right around the published point spread in NBA games. All it takes is a couple of fouls that do not necessarily need to be called or a technical foul here or there to create a few extra points.
That would be much more difficult to do at the end of a football, baseball or hockey game.
Yet while the possibility of a ref's going bad will always exist, this investigation proves that if something terribly wrong is happening on the court, it will be discovered. Whatever the findings against Donaghy end up being, they should not sully every other referee, but rather endorse them as people making their best efforts to get it right, even if they don't always succeed.
I also realize that during the coming season and beyond, every referee will be suspected of doing a Donaghy whenever a call goes against the home team - and not only at EnergySolutions Arena. It's just that Jazz fans were overly sensitive about the refs to the degree of complete paranoia in the playoffs, responding with boos and chants that soured an otherwise wonderful atmosphere in the building.
It's going to be even more ugly at times, now that they will have concrete material to use against Donaghy's former colleagues.
If anything, with Donaghy gone, the other refs really should get a bit of a break this season. When that first controversial foul is whistled against the Jazz in the first quarter of the home opener, how about no response at all? Just one call, going uncontested. That's all I'm asking.
