Professor McCann interviewed by ESPN regarding the future of the NBA in the wake of the Tim Donaghy gambling scandal.

Henry Abbott
Is the League in Jeopardy?
ESPN.com
July 05, 2007

I have heard worries that the Tim Donaghy scandal could actually put the existence of the NBA in a certain jeopardy.

Really?

This morning I emailed a ton of people who think a lot about the NBA, to see if they were worried about that. This was my question:

There has been a lot of talk about the Tim Donaghy scandal as one of the most serious black eyes any professional sports league has had in recent years. At any point in this process, have you felt at all concerned for the future of the league? Why or why not?

Here are some of the responses that struck me as most interesting:

Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks Owner

Not even a little bit. NBA fans come to and watch games because it's fun and exciting. End of story.

Dwight Jaynes of the Portland Tribune

I think the league is bigger than this. But I always see things differently than most. For example, I see a lot of people out there who want to blame David Stern or the league for not catching this guy. I mean, why -- because he was rude to his neighbors? Because there was one report he was spotted in a casino? Come on ... they have a lot of referees and these guys, by nature, are fairly confrontational... I can't imagine how much they deal with in regard to the referees. Perhaps I'm going too easy on them, but I believe what appears to be obvious -- that it was one guy, acting on his own and that makes him hard to catch. The more people involved, the easier it is to catch them.

On the other hand, if they don't make fundamental changes to the way the games are called, they're going to continually face criticism. My mail is running heavily toward that typical fan diatribe of 'We always knew the games were fixed,' which is a shame. But if the league shows it's serious about acting to make things better, it won't kill the NBA. Ultimately, it will make it better. Besides, the populace has a very short memory.

ESPN.com's John Hollinger

I thought the Artest melee was more damaging than this, to be honest. Only exception would be if multiple refs were found to be involved.

Michael McCann of the Sports Law Blog

I believe the NBA will recover from this scandal. The league has too many fans, in the U.S. and abroad, and there is too much money on the line in television and other entertainment contracts for this scandal to sink the ship. Also, while the NBA's product may not be as good as it was in the 80s, it's still undoubtedly the world's best basketball league, and that will help it absorb the scandal's fallout. In addition, I don't know of any individual scandal that ruined a major American sports league or sports organization. Major League Baseball overcame the Black Sox scandal, Pete Rose's betting-on-baseball scandal, and the steroids scandal; college football has overcome a wide array of corruption scandals; and even little league baseball overcame Danny Almonte lying about his age. It doesn't seem that individual scandals have the staying power to destroy popular sports leagues and organizations, and I don't think this one will prove to be an exception.

Having said that, I do wonder about the NBA's leadership going forward. I find it odd how the commissioner has seemed so intent on policing the players--the "kids," as he's sometimes called them, even though they are grown men--when he has overlooked a number of harmful league and team behaviors, such as teams purposefully losing games and now a ref apparently betting on games with mobsters. It would seem that instead of waging a personal war against high school players, do-rags, and night clubs, he should take a closer look at the people in his own house, the ones who may look far more like him than Allen Iverson.

Along those lines, I question the value of the NBA's internal investigation into Donaghy's activities. Stern's basic argument appears to be that Donaghy is the NBA's bad apple, and once the bad apple is removed, the barrel is saved. This is fairly standard corporate behavior when individuals engage in wrongdoing, such as sexual harassment in the workplace or hazing that occurs on college campuses: once it's clear to an organization that defending the individual is no longer worth it, the individual will be characterized as unusually malicious and a disgrace--in effect, the individual, who was previously "one of the guys," suddenly transforms into an evil person, a "rogue, isolated criminal" as Stern put it yesterday (even though Donaghy hasn't even been charged with a crime yet).

By focusing on the disposition and apparent choices of Donaghy, however, the NBA may miss to what extent its own policies and practices enabled a situation in which Donaghy could engage in wrongdoing--just like how companies and schools often miss how their own decisions enabled, or even promoted, certain apples to go bad (think about hazing and how it occurs year-after-year, with completely different students--it's not about the students, it's about the situation that colleges allow to exist). Fault, then, often needs to lie farther and wider than merely the individual wrongdoer, including all the way up to the top of the tree.

But since Stern seems motivated to limit the controversy to Donaghy, I question whether the NBA's internal review can successfully identify how far fault should lie. Even though he pledged yesterday to "do everything possible to analyze our processes," he vehemently maintained that the problem was limited to Donaghy; how can the NBA now conduct a thorough review when the Commissioner has already established its conclusion?

I believe the NBA would be better served by hiring an independent investigation agency or appointing an independent commission to look into Donaghy's actions and related NBA practices and procedures. An internal review may be in the best interests of top NBA officials, but I don't think it's in the best interests of the NBA.