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Originally Posted by Jurassic Referee
Isn't that what they were supposed to be doing already with their vaunted evaluation program? If the calls are that subjective(which a lot of them are imo), and it's so hard to decide whether the right call was made or not, don't you think that something new in the way of evaluation has to come about?
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I'm not sure if the original comment was made in regards to future attempts to detect cheating as part of the eval or not, I suspect it was. There has been a lot of criticism leveled because the NBA's current evaluation system didn't detect this. I just don't see how it could have.
Evaluating an official's performance for a single game is a very different activity than mining evaluation and other related data for evidence of fraud or cheating. If you're not focused on the latter, I don't see where there is any reasonable expectation that you would discover it, not if it's subtle.
To do so would indeed require something new. Probably an army of statistics nerds locked in a storage closet somewhere doing round-the-clock analyses on mountains of data about call selection, long term trends, what the odds were, what the outcome was, etc. In theory it should be possible to determine some kind of baseline profile for each official then spot deviations from it. Who knows, they may even be able to create the statistical equivalent of QuesTec.
And I'm sure Stern would love nothing more than to have irrefutable statistical evidence that the conspiracy theorists are all wrong. Well, except maybe to have it all printed in a hefty spread sheet he can roll up and beat the hell out of Mark Cuban with the next time he goes off
