Web Letters: NBA: When Fans Blow the Whistle

I went to most of the games in Ft. Wayne that year. I lived and breathed basketball. My dad played for Ft. Wayne and coached at one time. Molinas along with others were missing an astonishing number of second shots on rebounds. I kept stats on almost all the games.They were shooting 29 percent at home, where usually they were around 40 percent. I told my dad about it, who at the time didn't care two cents for Zollner or Fort Wayne. But he passed it on to Hilliard Gates, who said I wasn't correct on the numbers. I have great respect for Hilliard, but he was wrong: they for some reason, were missing a huge number of missed shots. Molinas got his just dues, but it's my opinion a lot of others were on his bandwagon. He took the rap realizing he would become a figure in organized crime. The last thing you do is squeal or you're finished. What I do have a problem with is coaches who can't pick it up after a while. I coached for ten years youth leagues and CYO and you know your players' abilities at any level. The story in NY was that Holman was the only one who didn't know his team was fixing games. It always amazed me that it's almost always the Midwest that gets the rap.

Bill McDermott

Surfside Beach, SC

I may be one of the few people left who has personal experience of the last time the NBA had a gambling scandal.The time was the mid 1950s, the NBA was a fledgling league, the twenty-four-second clock had not yet been introduced. My father was head coach of the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons), during the off season when the NBA had its draft. At that time the draft was territorial; each team was assigned a part of the US where they could draft players. Long story short, my father drafted a very good player out of Columbia University in NY by the name of Jack Molinas.

It seems that Molinas had grown up around gamblers, and it is said that he had fixed some games when he was in high school. He was very skilled about point spreads and point shaving. Needless to say, Molinas brought his considerable basketball skills and fixing skills to the NBA. None of Molinas's game fixing skills was known to the Pistons, the NBA or my father before he was drafted.

One of the other players on the Pistons that Molinas roomed with thought that Molinas's many phone calls to NY were suspisious and informed Fred Zollner, the owner of the Pistons. Zollner told my father and the FBI, who put a tap on Molinas's phone. Molinas was caught and banned for life from the NBA for game fixing.

If fans think that they have some kind of proof with this silly video, they are sadly mistaken. Fixing point spreads is very subtle, and most fans would not know it if they saw it. As Mr. Japinga so accurately pointed out in his article, fixing the point spread is done near the end of the game, a foul here or there in the last two minutes, to make sure the point spread is what the bookies want. We are not talking about fixing the outcome of the game but the final score. There is a big difference between determining the outcome of the game, and the point spread.

This video of game three of the Western conference finals proves nothing. Most home teams get the close calls--that's why it is so tough to win on the road in the NBA. It is going to be very tough to prove that Donaghy was fixing the outcome of games, as opposed to fixing point spreads. And even proving that is going to be difficult. Even after it was known that Molinas was fixing, it was very hard to prove by watching him play. Turn your head on defense, miss a foul shot, dribble out of bounds--there are a thousand ways to fix the point spread. Unless the NBA has some kind of proof, like phone taps or videos of Donaghy consorting with gamblers, this will be a tough case to prove.

By the way, Molinas has passed on. He was gunned down, I believe, near his home in LA over twenty years ago. If you want to read more about Molinas and his game fixing, I suggest a book called The Great Molinas.

R. Birch

Rancho San Diego, CA