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.
Large markets teams get the benefit of the doubt at the end of games
Let’s again post the statistics posted:
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
Let’s start off by looking at the top three teams on the list, the LA Clippers, the LA Lakers, and the Golden State Warriors.
Those three teams represent three of the largest markets in the league with some of the biggest stars in the league (because stars tend towards larger markets). Those are the only three teams that are getting 60% or greater of the incorrect calls in their favor.
Often times you might think based on how loud the fanbase is that these teams don’t get calls at the same rate as everybody else. But it’s actually exactly the opposite. These teams get more calls than anyone else.
So despite what LeBron or any other superstar in a coastal market will try to tell you, they not only get superstar calls that small market teams don’t get, they get a large market boost in incorrect calls going their way from NBA officials.
But on it’s own, this doesn’t show much about the small market teams, what does the data have to say about that?
If you rework the data, small markets get the most incorrect calls against them total.
So we went ahead and pulled the data into a spreadsheet and reworked it to look at total incorrect calls against the teams in the last two-minute report, and here are the 5 bottom teams.
- Dallas Mavericks – 27 incorrect calls against
- Sacramento Kings – 23 incorrect calls against
- Denver Nuggets – 22 incorrect calls against
- Indiana Pacers – 20 incorrect calls against
- Cleveland Cavaliers -18 incorrect calls against
Notice a pattern among the teams present in the list? Would most of them operate as small-market NBA teams? Notice the lack of LA teams? New York teams?
It’s important that the NBA take a long hard look at officiating and the so-called superstar treatment, because it may not only be that. Larger markets are getting more calls to go their way in addition to many of the other advantages that are already present such as collecting superstar free agents and the broken all-star voting.
Until the NBA addresses the inequities between small and large markets in terms of competitive advantage, these types of disparities will continue to emerge and compound as small market teams struggle to keep pace with the larger ones.