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On many forums, I here people saying that the NBA refs are the worst of all major sports. I'm wondering if the NBA refs really are the worst or if fans just don't realize how hard it is to ref an NBA game. What are your thoughts?
Here are a few things worth thinking about:
http://www.realclearsports.com/articles ... 97286.html

The Wall Street Journal did a couple studies in the past two years and determined that on average, an NFL game contains 11 minutes of action and an MLB game 14 minutes. These obviously pale in comparison to the 48 minutes of action in an NBA game. With that much more playing time there are bound to be more whistles and more plays for fans to gripe about.

The author also discusses that if there are about 10 runs scored in a baseball game (and even fewer in hockey) and 200 points in a basketball game, you'd expect erroneous calls that impact the score of the game to occur FAR more often in basketball than in in baseball or hockey.

No. Rugby and Cricket are two examples of sports that are more difficult to referee. Rugby is exceptionally difficult due to the lonely nature of the referee, the continuous nature of the game, the length of the game, the physicality of the game, the numerous situation types in the game, the rules on the passage of the ball under certain situations, the difference between forward play and back play.... Cricket is difficult to ref (umpire) because of the LBW rule, and little else, but judging LBW decisions has proven to be incredibly difficult, and has an enormous impact on the game.

There was likely to be a bent towards US sports in this thread, so I thought I would put this in here as an outsider.

Also, I feel I should point out that whoever originally wrote that high scoring games are more impacted by refereeing decisions probably doesn't have a good grasp of the topic. In high scoring games it is more likely that (assuming bias is zero (errors are random) and scoring is granular) errors 'cancel each other out', as is so often said.

v-zero wrote:
Also, I feel I should point out that whoever originally wrote that high scoring games are more impacted by refereeing decisions probably doesn't have a good grasp of the topic. In high scoring games it is more likely that (assuming bias is zero (errors are random) and scoring is granular) errors 'cancel each other out', as is so often said.

I think the claim is that erroneous decisions will impact the score of the game more often and thus draw more criticism in high scoring sports. It will give more frequent ammo to those who want to complain, especially if an erroneous decision happens close to the end of the game. Objectively, the errors may cancel each other out but the higher frequency of errors on "scoring plays" would still lead to more complaining by fans.

Rugby and Cricket ...

He said "major sports".
I've never seen even one minute of either.
I'm not sure I even know anyone who has watched Cricket.

They are major sports. If you want to constrain it to major US sports then fine, but don't assume sports aren't big just because they're not big in the US. Cricket is practically the national game in India, for instance, and there is basically no secondary sport to it there (field hockey being a distant second).

I feel that soccer referees have more impact on which team wins the game, since nowadays there's almost always at least one incorrectly (not)given 11m penalty kick per game. One 11m penalty kick probably results in a goal 80% of the time, which is ~25% of the total score.
(Not) giving the 11m penalty kicks is also more impactful, compared to most incorrect early/mid game NBA foul calls, because in soccer team strategy changes a lot more depending on current score.

They could (easily) fix those problems by using something like instant replay, but they don't seem to be moving very fast in that direction

J.E. wrote:They could (easily) fix those problems by using something like instant replay, but they don't seem to be moving very fast in that direction

An insane situation brought to you courtesy of FIFA.