Stats show NBA officiating is biased against small markets like Indiana Pacers
By Joe Lyon
The Pacers are constantly getting the short end of the stick being in a small market in a league that constantly is structuring rules to favor the larger markets. A new analysis shows that the NBA not only has structured free agency to favor the larger markets, it may also have a problem of officiating favoring the larger markets.
One new wrinkle in the NBA is the last two-minutes report, where the league looks at the last two minutes of close games and discusses what kinds of calls were missed and which were called but shouldn’t have been. And a new statistic shows that there may be some bias towards larger markets in the last two minute report.
Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo Sports has a new piece showing that does the analysis on the last two minute reports this season, and how many of the calls went in favor of the teams. A snapshot of the report is embedded in the tweet below.
Ask, and you shall receive: I reviewed every L2M report for every team, and here is the data (in which LAL is 2nd only to LAC in percentage of late-game missed calls/no-calls in their favor): @YahooSportsNBA: https://t.co/IQaUnIarmC pic.twitter.com/6j9RDctohW
— Ben Rohrbach (@brohrbach) January 31, 2023
The statistics look at every team in the NBA and how often the calls go in their favor in the last two minutes. However, if you parse apart the data you will start to notice some interesting findings.