No end to foul play in NBA

Bill's Rant

The NBA would like yesterday's sentencing of former referee Tim Donaghy to 15 months in prison to put a cap on one of the most unsettling episodes in the league's history.

But despite what league officials might wish, that's just not the case.

There is still the matter of the results of the league's own investigation - the Pedowitz Report, named after former federal prosecutor Lawrence Pedowitz, who is conducting the probe - into how Donaghy managed to get away with providing inside information to gamblers and evade NBA detection for so long and whether there is any substance to concerns that games refereed by other officials were somehow compromised.

Some media observers have even noted that, apart from any additional malfeasance, it should be disturbing that Donaghy was able to successfully predict the outcome of such a high percentage of games with the bare-bones insider information he had about game officials and injuries. The implication of that is obvious - officiating has varied so dramatically from crew to crew that it affects the final scores in a predictable way.

So, there's a lot about this case that doesn't go away just because Tim Donaghy does.