Basketball has a scandal on its hand cause of one bad ref (hopefully only one). David Stern said all the right things in his press conference, and is no doubt sincere. It's going to be rough on all the refs for a few years, they're going to be under intense scrutiny.
Refs have to able to do their job, but there are some rule changes that can be made that limit a rogue ref's ability to effect the outcome of a game. It's a hard game to call, there are fouls on nearly every trip down the court, and it's difficult for the refs to be consistent on which fouls they call and which fouls they ignore.
The biggest change that should be made is eliminate fouling out. Calling a couple of quick early fouls on a team's best player is one of the most effective ways for a ref determined to change a game to do so. If it's just free throws and not a threat of losing that player at the end of the game, then coaches wouldn't be forced to change their substitution patterns and game plan. Dick Vitale has been trying to push this change for college for some time. His suggestion would be that after a player gets past a certain number fouls, instead of fouling out, that the opposing team would get 2 shots and the ball, for each foul committed by a player with more than five fouls (or four in college). It's a good suggestion, would still force coaches to make decisions on players who accumulate fouls, but wouldn't deprive the team or fans of the opportunity of seeing the big stars at crunch time. It's tough agreeing with Vitale, but for the good of the league, I'll do so in this case.
The second change would be to pay these guys an obscene amount of money. Charge each team $1 million dollars a year to be put into a salary pool for the refs, and the league kick in another $20 million. The reason players aren't the target for game fixing schemes in the NBA is because the lowest paid players make over $500,000 a year, and most players make more than $3,000,000. The amount of money you'd have to pay people making that much money to throw a game is more than the money you'd make having the game fixed. But the refs don't make player type money, so they are a natural target. If refs had a pay scale that went from $250,000 to $1,000,000 or more, they'd not only attract more applicants, but they'd have to be really greedy or stupid to get as screwed up as Tim Donaghy is alleged being.
The third change would be to eliminate as many of the 'judgement call' type rules as you can. Let the players play, let coaches call whatever defense and whatever offense they want, keep the fouls that would endanger players if they were eliminated (like moving screens), and keep fouls like double dribble on traveling (even though those infractions are missed often), but take a careful look at all the other infractions and whittle them down where possible.
The league will take care of this problem, David Stern has been good at tackling whatever challenge is presented, it's still a great sport, and they've still got an amazing collection of athletes doing mind boggling things on a nightly basis.
The NBA will get past this, but problems will linger, this is a blow to their league, but not a fatal one.
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