The commissioner must take stronger measures to regain the public's trust after the Tim Donaghy debacle

Ref Crawford could connect with the crowd. Brian Bahr/Getty Images

Though it doesn't come out in his somber pronouncements about fines and suspensions, the free-market imperative to grow the sport, and, of course, the hellfire reserved for officials who conspire with gamblers, David Stern does possess an excellent feel for the rhythm and tempo of his game. When he watches the NBA at home or in hotel rooms, Stern confessed in a recent interview, he sometimes finds himself leaping from his seat and hollering at the TV. "How can you make that call! Are you blind?" And as a fan, not to mention a commissioner, he's well aware of the unpleasantness in the NBA ether this season. Forget the lowest TV ratings ever for the Finals last spring and the embarrassing dirty laundry aired by the Knicks in federal court before training camps opened; one calamity trumps them all. On Jan. 28, Tim Donaghy is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to transmit gambling information across state lines. The sentencing was postponed from Nov. 9, leading some to speculate that the disgraced ref is providing additional information to the FBI in an effort to get a more lenient sentence.

Indeed, a giant cloud has hovered over the NBA since the Donaghy revelations broke in July. Though league officials insist -- and the evidence to date bears them out -- that Donaghy was an "isolated rogue criminal" (Stern's characterization of choice), the disconcerting roar had to be addressed. To do nothing would have been to miss an opportunity to, as Stern says, "talk about ways we can improve the [referee] system and deal with issues such as recruitment, education, mentoring, teaching and rules, both on and off the court." To make wholesale changes, such as firing Stu Jackson, the NBA executive vice president who oversees refs, or Ronnie Nunn, the director of officials, would have been seen as an admission that Donaghy's reprehensible actions, including betting on games he worked, were the product of a flawed system. So instead the league made subtle fixes.

The NBA hired recently retired official Bernie Fryer as Nunn's assistant, giving the striped shirts a popular, one-of-the-guys resource to tap into as well as giving the league someone to train the new (and the incompetent) in the art of getting calls right. The league also expanded the use of instant replay to include the review of flagrant-foul-2 calls, which carry an automatic ejection, and on-court altercations, to help referees decide on possible ejections.

This is all fine as far as it goes, but more must be done. First and foremost, the NBA has to make every effort to cut down on the sheer number of calls, which is what leads to the mind-numbing procession to the foul line that slows games to a crawl. (The apparent way that Donaghy affected games, remember, was to make call after call, everything by the book, so that more free throws would be shot and an informed bettor could take the "over.") One easy change would be to instruct officials to swallow their whistles on the oft-disputed, can't-get-it-right-anyway charging call unless it's a blatant infraction. If wild-haired Cavaliers forward Anderson Varejão wants to plant himself in front of a ball handler in an attempt to make an impact on the game, let him go splat but don't reward him for it. I have the feeling that most refs agree but are afraid to be overruled by the league office, the eye-in-the-sky that subjects them to endless video second-guessing.

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