Racial Profiling In The NBA

I am not a basketball fan, or any other sports fan, and I don;t have the figures that show the number of blacks and the number of whites but when I am surfing it seems to me that the teams in the NBA are predominately black and therefore you would expect to see more calls against blacks. The thing that bothers me is that the study shoes that when officials are black they tend not to make as many calls and this could be construed as reverse discrimination.

Race of NBA referees affects foul calls: study
Updated Wed. May. 2 2007 2:57 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff

A new study suggests that racial bias is being played out on the hardwood courts of the National Basketball Association, with white officials found to be more likely to call fouls against black players.

The academic study of NBA officiating, conducted by an assistant professor at the the University of Pennsylvania and a Cornell graduate student, also found that black officials were more likely to call fouls on white players.

However, the tendency was less dramatic among black officials.

Overall, the study -- which has not yet been subjected to peer review -- suggests a team's chances of winning are noticeably affected by the number of white or black referees officiating, and a crew of three officials could affect foul calls by as much as 4.5 per cent.

The study, which was conducted over 13 seasons through to 2004, was based on information from publicly available box scores.

It found differences in everything from a drop in scoring to a rise in the number of turnovers, depending on the race of the officials.

"Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,'' authors Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at Penn's Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, wrote in their findings.

But the most significant result pertained to foul calls.

"Black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.''

But the NBA slammed the results as misleading and based on incomplete information.

"The study that is cited in the New York Times article is wrong,'' Joel Litvin, the NBA's president of league and basketball operations, told The Associated Press bluntly.

"The fact is there is no evidence of racial bias in foul calls made by NBA officials and that is based on a study conducted by our experts who looked at data that was far more robust and current than the data relied upon by Professor Wolfers.