Just as the NBA was tamping out the embers on the Donaghy betting scandal - his sentencing in Brooklyn Federal Court is only a month away - the former referee's lawyer shows up with the napalm.
In a letter submitted yesterday to U.S. District Court Judge Carol Amon, attorney John Lauro detailed Donaghy's testimony on the "inner-workings" of the NBA - a league in which Donaghy alleges executives manipulate games to boost earnings, referees accept gifts from coaches, and "anonymous" observers who are supposed to monitor the referees' performances hobnob with the refs in their locker room.
In Los Angeles, for Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the Celtics and Lakers, commissioner David Stern responded to the allegations.
"All I can say is that he's looking for anything that will somehow shorten the sentence, and it's not going to happen," he said.
During meetings in July and September of last year, according to Lauro, Donaghy told federal prosecutors and FBI agents about instances in which referees acted as the pawns of league executives, withholding calling technical fouls on "certain star players" so as to not "hurt ticket sales and television ratings."
One referee who went against those instructions - sent down by an NBA executive - in January 2000 was privately reprimanded by the league, Donaghy claimed.
Donaghy, 41, a Havertown native and Villanova grad who began working as an official in 1994, also said that at least two playoff games were manipulated to prolong the series.
In 2002, for instance, he claims that a pair of referees conspired to push the Lakers-Kings Western Conference finals to a seventh game by "heavily" favoring Los Angeles in Game 6. The teams were not named in the letter, but only the Lakers-King series went seven games that year.
