LeBron, Lakers and referees, oh my

Each week during the 2022-23 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether the trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last time on Fact or Fiction: Is Michael Jordan also the GOAT of the worst current NBA owners?]

Let us get this out of the way up top: I believe the egregiousness of calls in a number of NBA playoff series from the early 2000s raise legitimate questions about the integrity of officials before Tim Donaghy resigned amid a gambling scandal. I am not of the belief there is currently some grand conspiracy behind officiating.

I am also convinced that every arbiter carries unconscious biases, and that the referees’ union revealed one of theirs by groveling to LeBron James and his Los Angeles Lakers over one “gut-wrenching” blown call in their late-January overtime loss to the Boston Celtics that “will weigh heavily and cause sleepless nights.”

That perplexing tweet from @OfficialNBARefs came after James lamented, “I watch basketball every single day. I watch these games every single day, and I don’t see it happening to nobody else. It’s just weird.”

I reviewed the NBA’s last two-minute reports and created the Restless Nights Index at the time to illustrate how ludicrous that statement was. In the aftermath of that game — one in which the league admitted to blowing the call in question and another that aided the Lakers in the final seconds of regulation — James’ team was one of five that actually benefited from bad whistles late in close games at least 59% of the time.

They remain top five in that respect, and only the two teams that met in last year’s Finals — the Celtics and Golden State Warriors — have been on the better side of more blown calls per game in clutch situations.

An updated table of the number of close games for each team, the total amount of incorrect calls or no-calls in those games, the number of those calls that went in favor of each team…