The steroid era in Major League Baseball has forever tainted the game.  Most fans cannot watch an MLB game without wondering who is using performance enhancing drugs.  Some of the best players in the game have been linked to PEDs; Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi and Manny Ramirez.  And baseball’s biggest stars in this era have had the steroid rumors swirl around them, including; Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.  What has MLB done to help this situation?  What has the commissioner done to restore confidence that his players are clean?  Not much.  It seems their official stance is similar to AIG’s; just shut up and hope all of the negative attention goes away.

Now it is the NBA’s turn to defend itself against the rumors that their league is tainted.  These rumors come from a familiar source, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy.  In his new book, Blowing the Whistle, Donaghy tells tales of the NBA refs working on behalf of the league to make games close.  He asserts that he and fellow refs would make side bets that affected how they called the game.  Worse he says that the league would instruct their officials to assist certain teams when a certain team winning was important to the league (sorry Sacramento Kings fans).  Donaghy says a lot of damning stuff in the book; here are some more excerpts posted by Deadspin.

If any of the allegations by Donaghy are true, then the NBA has a huge problem they need to correct.  The question now is how seriously will NBA Commissioner David Stern take these assertions from Donaghy?  Will the league investigate further to see if these stories are true?  Will they address this head-on or just hide and hope it goes away?  A conspiracy theorist might already wonder if the league is punishing their referees by locking them out and using replacement refs to start the 2009-2010 season.  Maybe there is more going on there than the two sides not being able to come to an agreement on a deal.

Back to reality, the NBA has to handle this situation carefully in my opinion.  They don’t want to overreact because there is no proof any of the allegations are true.  Remember that Donaghy is a convicted felon, who ratted out the mobsters he was helping to gamble on games and that Tim is likely broke.  Which are all reasons he might not be the most reliable source and could very easily have embellished details in his book to make some extra cash.

But that’s a dangerous game of chicken to play if the NBA is going to simply say that Donaghy is a liar and not look into this matter further.  Because it would take very little for this situation to escalate.  What would it take to corroborate the stories told by Donaghy in his book?  Just one other referee or player to step forward and validate Donaghy’s stories; then the NBA would have a sh*tstorm of negative media.  This is likely what keeps David Stern up at night; someone coming forward to validate the claims of the NBA’s disgraced former referee.

If I’m Commissioner Stern, I would get on top of this situation now and find out if any of this is true.  That would allow them to quickly correct any wrongdoing they discover and refute anything they find out is not true.  If there is any wrongdoing by the league office or their refs, then they need to apologize to the fans and insure this never happens again.  People will still love the NBA and they’ll respect the game more if they know it’s clean.