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never kept up with ref assignments. dont even understand the point of it
For my own reasons, I keep track of officiating assignments at playoff time. As we progress along, it's interesting to me that tonight, Bavetta is working the Hawks/Cavs game but is NOT the crew chief. Bavetta has been a playoff crew chief for years -- including one of the 4 Finals crew chiefs for about the last decade. He was a crew chief in the First Round, but 5 games into Round 2, he's the first of those to be knocked down a peg.
Maybe the NBA is starting, ever-so-slowly, to move Bavetta out to pasture.
never kept up with ref assignments. dont even understand the point of it
That's interesting. I guess Bavetta finally graded poorly enough to get knocked down at least one step. He has to be coming up to his final year or two in the NBA.
I got curious a few years ago about who the league seems to think are the best officials. I figured if I knew who those people were, I could watch the way that they call games and learn something. It's actually been a really good way to learn the nuances of the NBA game. Maybe that's just me, though.
How's Bennett Salvatore? lol
i just thought the more i looked into the reffing assignments, the more i would subconsciously buy into conspiracy theories after the 2002 scandal. I try to stay away from that
And i think its cool when watching a boring NBA game to just watch the referees and how they are influenced sometimes by the home crowd or other factors. I had to go through that experience as an intramural ref myself. though it was interesting
It's never been an easy thing to keep track of the crew chief notion, but I'm wondering if the league bumps down two of the 8 crew chiefs in Round 2. So far, 6 of the Round 1 crew chiefs have called games (or will call them tonight): D. Crawford, Wunderlich, Foster, Javie, and McCutchen. Bavetta's not a crew chief tonight, as noted. That leaves only Salvatore and Joey Crawford -- and interestingly, for Game 7 of Heat/Hawks, Joey was the crew chief with Salvatore as an assistant official. If we're down to 6 crew chiefs, I think it's likely that Joey is the 6th and that Salvatore has suffered the same fate as Bavetta.
What's most interesting for me at this point is the clear infusion of younger blood -- Wunderlich, Foster, and McCutchen -- among the "elite" officials. If you assume that the 8 crew chiefs in Round 1 are all going to work the Finals, that leaves 4 other officials to work that round. Tom Washington, Ken Mauer, Joe Derosa, and Ed Rush all worked the Finals last year (or in years prior). Mike Callahan, Ron Garretson, and Jim Clark have all worked playoff games this year and have also worked past Finals. But the presence of the younger officials as crew chiefs (McCutchen is a crew chief despite never having worked a Finals game ever; Foster and Wunderlich are crew chiefs after having been Finals officials for the first time in 2008), I wonder if maybe some younger officials are going to supplant one or more of the old standbys come the Finals.
That's one of the things that I've learned about in spending some time to learn about the officials. I can't say I know anything about any of them, but there are pretty clearly officials who will either play to the home crowd or be intimidated by a home crowd; and there are clearly officials who don't give a crap about the home crowd. There are clearly officials who are technically sound and there are clearly officials who make a lot of guess calls. There are officials who allow more physical play and don't fall prey to flopping; there are officials who call lots of touch fouls and buy a good flop quite regularly.
I understand your point about conspiracy theories, but if anything, I think learning about the officials and who is deemed to be at what level on the heirarchy of qualificiations has taught me that much that is thought to be conspiratorial is actually just incompetence. If anything, it's convinced me that there is no conspiracy, that officiating is (for the most part) even in most games, and that calls really don't determine the outcome of games. Maybe I'm just deluding myself into those beliefs, but it's what I see.
I'm glad you got curious, I've learned a lot about the refs and the ref system from you. It's been interesting and it's led me to watching games differently. Not the conspiracy stuff, but, like you said, the nuances of the game.
Keep sharing, it's not just you.
If anyone thinks NBA fans are crazy for tracking the notoriety of certain officials, you should see how baseball fans react.
But still, anyone with the last name of Crawford. That means you, Cindy and Carl.
Just for the sake of putting this out there, here are the officials who worked in Round 1, sorted by the number of games that they worked (note: as a general rule, the more games worked per round, the better the quality of the official to the league):
(C) = crew chief
7 games
Joey Crawford (C)
Steve Javie (C)
6 games
Monty McCutchen (C)
Bennett Salvatore (C)
Mark Wunderlich (C)
5 games
Bavetta (C)
James Capers
Sean Corbin
Dan Crawford (C)
Marc Davis
Scott Foster (C)
Ron Garretson
Derrick Stafford
Tom Washington
Greg Willard
4 games
Tony Brothers
Mike Callahan
Joe Derosa
Bill Kennedy
Ken Mauer
Bill Spooner
3 games
Derrick Collins
David Jones
Ed Malloy
2 games
Jim Clark
Joe Forte
Violet Palmer
Jason Phillips
Ed Rush -- injured in Game 3 of SA/DAL
Michael Smith
Leon Wood
Zach Zarba
Gary Zielinski
1 game
Pat Fraher
Eric Lewis
TOTAL = 35 Officials in Round 1 (average for Round 1 over last 3-5 years is about 36)
Interesting work
FWD, what do you think of McCutchen? I've never been too highly impressed with him and it's odd that the NBA has elevated him. He's a bit of a hot head and seems to sometimes make calls strictly out of anger. The positive thing about him is he's starting to have that Joey Crawford, Steve Javie type presence about him that allows him to make the right call on the road .... but he also can go on a rampage of bad calls.
I'm not a huge McCutchen fan, but I do see him as a Javie clone of sorts. I think McCutchen will take a big step forward when he masters the sort of zen view of officiating that Javie seems to have found. Javie was very much the way that you describe McCutchen -- and probably at about the same point in his career. But he seems to have found some tranquility that makes his game calls far less personal and, coincidentally, much more accurate. (After years of thinking he was just somewhere near the top, I'm pretty sure Javie is the league's best official right now; if there happens to be a Finals Game 7 this year, I'd expect him to be an official for that game). That's what makes Javie great -- it's not that he's a sucker for a road team; it's that he doesn't fall prey to the pressure to make a home town call (or non-call) in a big spot.Interesting work
FWD, what do you think of McCutchen? I've never been too highly impressed with him and it's odd that the NBA has elevated him. He's a bit of a hot head and seems to sometimes make calls strictly out of anger. The positive thing about him is he's starting to have that Joey Crawford, Steve Javie type presence about him that allows him to make the right call on the road .... but he also can go on a rampage of bad calls.
I don't understand the elevation of McCutchen to such lofty heights so quickly. Like I say, he's never done a Finals game yet he's among the 8 playoff crew chiefs and remains a crew chief in Round 2. But he's been moving up the ranks pretty steadily for years and I had believed he'd become a Finals offical this year or next. He's obviously done that. I think we've seen the rampages of bad calls from him -- frankly, I thought he had one of those games in Game 5 of Spurs/Mavs for about 3 quarters. But I think most of the time, he's right. He's among the better officials at not falling for flops, though I think sometimes he will assume flops when there's contact that should have been called.
It's clear now that in the rankings of the 8 original playoff crew chiefs, Bavetta was #8 and Wunderlich was #7.
Bavetta hasn't worked a single CSF game as crew chief (he's been on crews with Javie (Game 1 of CLE/ATL) and Dan Crawford (Game 6 of BOS/ORL and Gmae 4 of LAL/HOU).
Wunderlich -- before the Antoine Wright debacle -- was crew chief for Game 1 of BOS/ORL, but has been an assistant since, working with Salvatore (Game 3 of DEN/DAL) and McCutchen (Game 6 of LAL/HOU).
With no more than 4 games remaining in Round 2 (and with a certainty that if we get Game 7's, the crews in those games will be comprised of all Finals officials), here's who's still working:
CREW CHIEFS
Dan Crawford (4)
Joey Crawford (3)
Scott Foster (3)
Steve Javie (3)
Monty McCutchen (4)
Bennett Salvatore (3)
MULTIPLE ROUND 2 GAMES
Bavetta (3)
Mike Callahan (3)
Joe Derosa (3)
Ron Garretson (3)
Bill Kennedy (3)
Ken Mauer (3)
Bill Spooner (3)
Tom Washington (3)
Mark Wunderlich (3)
James Capers (2)
Marc Davis (2)
Derrick Stafford (2)
Greg Willard (2)
WORKED SINGLE GAME IN ROUND 2
Tony Brothers
Sean Corbin
David Jones
Ed Malloy
Violet Palmer
Eddie F. Rush
Michael Smith
Leon Wood
My guess would be that if anyone in the first 2 groups -- crew chiefs and those who've called multiple 2nd round games -- are exclusively the list of officials who will work the conference finals (though Ed Rush might join that group) and are those considered by the league to be the top 20 or so officials in the game.
I think we're down to a list of about 16 officials who have a chance to be among the 12 who will call the Finals in 2009:
1. Bavetta
2. Mike Callahan
3. Dan Crawford
4. Joe Crawford
5. Marc Davis
6. Joe Derosa
7. Scott Foster
8. tson
Steve Javie
Ken Mauer
Monty McCutchen
Bennett Salvatore
Bill Spooner
Derrick Stafford
Tom Washington
Mark Wunderlich
I think it's sad that NBA fans know so much about the refs. I mean the NBA shouldn't be like that. NBA fans should not care about the refs. The NBA also shouldn't prop up refs like they are players. They are refs. They officiate the games. Nothing more, nothing less.
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