Free Throw Bias in the NBA
Published:
Disgruntled twitter heads are constantly clamoring that NBA officiating is in dire straits, their team of choice the victim of an endless league-wide conspiracy. At the bottom of the fanatics’ paranoia, there does appear to be something of a consensus that there’s such a thing as ‘superstar’ calls, i.e., a pattern of superstar players getting favorable calls that players on two-way contracts aren’t getting. This naturally leads us to ask whether there’s a bias favoring big-market teams in the association? I’ll apply some basic econometric techniques, including Bayesian posterior analytical derivation, to test the hypothesis that there is a bias in favor of big-market teams.