First, I want to say. I will look at all of Tim Donaghy's claims as unbaised as possible. I want this to be like Snopes.com and at the end will rate the claims as falsehood to truth though I suspect almost all will fall somewhere in between.
I was a Celtics fan for years and remembering watching finals on tape delay. Then when the Dallas Mavericks were formed, they became my primary team.
Over the years, I increasingly convinced the NBA was not fair. There were numerous games by various teams that were making me blame the NBA refs were either corrupt and/or incompetent. You know most of them without me saying them (e.g. Kings/Lakers), but I'll mention a few of the lesser known ones that personally affected me:
2002 Spurs/Mavericks series. Game 1 was called in such a way that it guaranteed a Mavericks victory. Game 2 was the infamous game where Joey Crawford decided to call a bunch of Ts against the Mavericks in the opening minutes destroying the game from the beginning and was supposedly later was called on the carpet.
2005 Rockets/Mavericks series. This one is covered by Donaghy and I will get into it further. Yao was a moving screen machine during the early parts of the series and helped their 2-0 lead. JVG's reveal about NBA corruption and $100,000 fine. And yes, Rockets fan, I will say it: Finley was out of bounds - you 100% got screwed on that critical call.
2006 Spurs/Mavericks playoffs series. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was one of the worst ref'd series in NBA history though nobody talks about it. The refs attempted to control the winner of 6 of the 7 games. They were successful 5 times - only game 7 did they fail in their attempt. It was at this point that I started watching the calls instead of the games and was the end of my NBA watching days.
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