Tim Donaghy On How NBA Favored Big Market Teams: 'They Really Want Lakers To Win Tonight'

Former NBA referee Tim Donaghy is back with some more explosive claims regarding the league. Donaghy has now shared how the NBA tried to give big-market teams an advantage against mid-market ones.

"They used to put us in a room and show us plays to concentrate on that they didn't want us to miss," Donaghy told 1010 XL. "It was always for those big market teams, and always against mid-market teams. It's not fixed, but they definitely put one team at an advantage."

"We'd walk out of those (pre-game) meetings and say, 'Oh man, they really want the Lakers to win tonight.' If you're getting paid $25,000 for each playoff game, you want the series to extend, too," Donaghy stated.

With the prevalent belief that the league favors teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, there would be many who would believe these claims by Donaghy. When he adds the point about the monetary benefit, it gives more credence to the claim as well. These remarks obviously put into question the integrity of the NBA but I would take everything the 57-year-old says with a grain of salt.

Donaghy started working as an NBA referee in 1994 and it was a job that he held on to for 13 years. He was part of the officiating crew for 772 regular-season games and 20 playoff games. It was all going great, but then in 2007, the FBI launched an investigation into a referee betting on NBA games and it was soon revealed to be Donaghy. 

Donaghy resigned that very year and eventually admitted to betting on games he officiated, in the 2003–04, 2004–05, 2005–06, and 2006–07 seasons. He pled guilty to two federal charges and was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. Donaghy spent 11 months in one and served the rest of his sentence in a halfway house.

Donaghy has been ostracized by the NBA community ever since those days and he has responded by making one controversial claim after another. None have really been conclusively proven to be true thus far.

Tim Donaghy Shared How The League Tried To Help Michael Jordan

Staying on the topic of Donaghy making claims about the NBA favoring big-market teams, he once shared how the league tried to help Michael Jordan. In the Netflix documentary Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul, Donaghy shared what the NBA and Phil Jackson told him after he called a traveling violation on Jordan.

"I started to understand what's within the game in the NBA. I was in Philadelphia and I am refereeing Sixers-Bulls. They were cracking down on the spin move that they wanted the officials to call traveling. Michael Jordan makes the spin move, I make the call. Phil Jackson comes off the bench and he starts giving me sh*t. I say, 'Wait a second, Phil. You know as well as I do that's the spin move they're telling us to call.' And he said, 'While they might want that play called, they certainly don't want it called on him', and he pointed at Jordan who just walked by and stared at me. I got in the locker room, the other referee said, 'They want that call but don't want to on him'. 

Donaghy also claimed that the NBA told the referees to call more fouls on Kobe Bryant so he could score more. He also alleged that the league fixed the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Sacramento Kings and the 2006 NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks. Expect more such claims to come out over the coming years.