SportsAndWhine
Dumbass For Hire
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Part of the Soccer Mom mentality that sportswriters pin on Blazers fans is that we feel like we never get ref respect, that the refs are always giving the opponent more free throw attempts than us. I'm not going to take a stand on whether this is a conspiracy against us or whatever, but I did want to look at the data to see if we were at least justified in thinking we used to get respect, but don't anymore.
I used a super-simple formula: our FTA/game versus our Opponent FTA/game. I scoured basketball-reference.com for 35+ years of data (1982-83 - 2017-18), and tallied up the results:
In short, there's never been a streak of years like we've had where we've shot so many fewer FT's than our opponents. And, we've never experience any single year discrepancy as big as the last three years. Even this year, which is already a massive improvement over last year and two years ago, would be the biggest discrepancy in the last 35 years if the two previous years didn't exist.
Right or wrong, I can see where fans would (a) become bitter about this even if they could only feel it as generally unfair treatment, and (b) maybe begin to form conspiracy theories as the feeling of unfairness continues year after year after year.
But we're four years running now on this... maybe this is why we hired a former ref.
I used a super-simple formula: our FTA/game versus our Opponent FTA/game. I scoured basketball-reference.com for 35+ years of data (1982-83 - 2017-18), and tallied up the results:
In short, there's never been a streak of years like we've had where we've shot so many fewer FT's than our opponents. And, we've never experience any single year discrepancy as big as the last three years. Even this year, which is already a massive improvement over last year and two years ago, would be the biggest discrepancy in the last 35 years if the two previous years didn't exist.
Right or wrong, I can see where fans would (a) become bitter about this even if they could only feel it as generally unfair treatment, and (b) maybe begin to form conspiracy theories as the feeling of unfairness continues year after year after year.
But we're four years running now on this... maybe this is why we hired a former ref.
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