New NBA marketing spot:

"I Love This Game, Especially if I Know Who is Hurt, Which Ref Hates Which Player and Who Will Be Making the Calls."

Sure. Give the whole thing some Las Vegas glitz, just to show that it isn't gambling that's bad, it's bad gamblers.

Got to keep that Nevada market viable.

The other sneaker has yet to drop, and maybe it never will. Maybe the NBA will get off being mistrusted as a crooked sport and by Christmas, as David Stern has predicted, this will all be summer leftovers.

Tim Donaghy, the ex-referee who admitted Wednesday he had passed on information to gamblers on how to bet NBA games, will be out of sight and out of mind, just the isolated rogue Stern insists he is.

And every call that goes against the home team will be agreed with, every missed call on the visitors will be forgiven and the new uniform of all NBA officiating crews will include a halo.

Two words. Fat. Chance.

This is all just handy ammunition for assumptions already held, that the game is at the mercy of men with agendas, always against the home team.

The fact that now money has been added to the equation almost makes it more comprehensible, for it is a lot easier to appreciate greed than it is to understand grudges.

Even before all of this, before Donaghy was identified, not by the shrewd eye and elaborate system that reviews NBA officials but by the law, fans thought the worst, expected the worst and imagined the worst could get even worse.

The idea that somehow Donaghy has shattered the reputation of the NBA as truth, justice and the American way can be believed only if the American way is considered to be getting away with whatever you can.

What was it one of the U.S. attorneys called it, the "corrupting allure of easy money"?

Not so easy, really. You have to be clever, not obvious, to be able to fool a system set up to remove all suspicion.

A referee cannot actually fix a basketball game, not without setting off alarms not only in the league but in places where an honest game is required, where bets are made and taken.

Nothing will bring down the wrath of vengeance quicker than a gambler being (1) stiffed or (2) left out of inside poop.

When this is finally all sorted out, it is most likely that somebody did not pay up or did not produce the result that was promised.

Even the old basketball favorite, point shaving, is beyond one man in a three-man crew. And the very inside information that Donaghy admitted to providing does not mean a round ball won't take funny bounces.

So, where are we today in the great rogue ref scandal? We are no closer to knowing exactly what happened, or why the NBA didn't know it was happening, or how to keep it from happening again than when a stunned Stern admitted to the world that the sky had fallen.

The whole story does not even matter because restoring faith in the NBA is going to take a long time, longer than the term of this commissioner, now both shaken and stirred, not to mention humbled.

The last great crisis in the NBA came in the '70s, when the league was seen as full of drug addicts and lackluster performers, a game so out of touch with its audience that the NBA Finals were shown on tape delay.

To the rescue came Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and followed closely behind by Michael Jordan and the generation that became the Dream Team.

Since then, since the second retirement of Jordan, not the third, the game has lost the grip it had, anticipating the emergence of LeBron James to bring back the magic, no pun intended.

Fortifying fan apathy is a series of dull competitions and dull champions (two more words. San. Antonio.) as well as scandals and fights and surly stars and bad actors.

Cleaning up the image of the officiating is a must, and a place to start there would be to make officials available to the press to explain things, or even to publish the games they will be working so that it is not inside information but mere data, but the NBA needs to find excitement and make a connection again.

All any fan ever wants when he loves a game is to have the game love him back.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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