I've listened to people say the NBA would never recover from this.
Tick, tick, tick - these have been the longest final moments to destruction in history.
The truth is that despite the talking and speculation, the NBA has suffered no significant injury despite being involved in one of the most public gambling scandals in professional sports history.
Certainly, the NBA has taken some embarrassing hits.
The league spent millions of dollars conducting internal investigations, revising policy and developing solutions to help reassure public trust.
Still, outside of bad publicity, what has been the damage?
In reality, the long recovery process many said the NBA was going to have to go through lasted until the start of the 2007-08 season.
I just didn't see the effect in the critical areas that would indicate that a multibillion-dollar sports league was in trouble.
The NBA set an all-time attendance record by averaging 17,757 fans per game during the 2006-07 season.
A plunge in attendance would have been the first indicator of the Donaghy scandal damaging the league.
While it is true that NBA overall average attendance dropped last season, it only fell 4.5 percent to 17,141 per game.
Maybe Donaghy had something to do with that, but it could be just as easily explained as people watching their dollar more closely because of a sagging economy.
Even with Donaghy claiming during the 2008 NBA Finals that he knew of NBA games that had been willfully manipulated to create favorable scenarios for the league and television broadcast partners, the ratings for the 2008 Finals between the Celtics and Lakers were a 9.3 - the highest since the 2004 Finals.
Celtics against the Lakers?
If conspiracy ruled the day, the first Finals matchup between the league's marquee franchises since 1987 would have raised so many red flags that the ratings should have been the lowest ever.
