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This video makes me cringe. Watch it before the NBA gets it yanked:

Is this the same way the steroid revelations affected baseball fans?

They must have known that athletes like Bonds, Sosa and McGuire don't suddenly gain 40 lbs. of muscle and start breaking records in the second half of their careers, or that a scrub like Brady Anderson doesn't hit 50 home runs on creatine alone. And then felt so gullible and betrayed after.

With the NBA, we didn't know, but we did know.

Witness what Bill Simmons wrote at the time:

Congratulations to Greg Willard, Tim Donaghy and Eddie F. Rush for giving us the most atrociously officiated game of the playoffs so far: Game 3 of the Suns-Spurs series. Bennett Salvatore, Tom Washington and Violet Palmer must have been outraged that they weren't involved in this mess. Good golly. Most of the calls favored the Spurs, but I don't even think the refs were biased -- they were so incompetent that there was no rhyme or reason to anything that was happening. Other than the latest call in NBA history (a shooting foul for Manu Ginobili whistled three seconds after the play, when everyone was already running in the other direction), my favorite moment happened near the end, when the game was already over and they called a cheap bump on Bruce Bowen against Nash, so the cameras caught Mike D'Antoni (the most entertaining coach in the league if he's not getting calls) screaming sarcastically, "Why start now? Why bother?" What a travesty. Not since the cocaine era from 1978-1986 has the league faced a bigger ongoing issue than crappy officiating.

You can suspend or even ban players and coaches. You can smack down GMs like Kevin McHale and penalize their franchises.

But, with refs, their raison d'être is to be the on-court presence of fairness, justice, objectivity. When you cannot trust them, it is no longer a sport.

Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos?