But sympathetic?

Allow me to be the first.

While every other major sport has been marred by dubious officiating at one time or another, only the NBA endures an ongoing debate about whether or not the league unethically influences the outcome of its playoff games.

So why does the feeling that something is rotten in the NBA persist?

A few theories:

Misinterpreting The Human Element

Despite epithets to the contrary, basketball officials are human beings. They cannot see things as dispassionately as the camera does and, therefore, are susceptible to a host of non-nefarious influences.

The most obvious and pressing influence in an NBA playoff game is the home crowd. When an official blows his whistle he knows the ensuing signal will trigger either a warm ovation or calls for his head. What he might not know is that that knowledge has already influenced what he's seen.

As Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly explained in his book "Blink," our prejudices cloud our snap judgments. An official may not care which team wins a game or whether the series goes seven, but he has a definite prejudice about the 19,000 people crowded around him who may suddenly wish him harm.

In the blink of a 50-50 block-charge call, a perfectly honest referee might see the play differently based on the venue. The result is an exaggerated home-court advantage, which makes it harder to win road games, which means more seven-game series. Nothing particularly sinister about that.

But in pointing out foul-shot disparity the angry fan can always ascribe dark intent to the officials who whistled the game unevenly.

The Non-Smoking Guns

Nothing breathes new life into a conspiracy theory like actual evidence. And that's just what Tim Donaghy's letter to the court would appear to be, first-hand acknowledgement of the league's manipulation.

Donaghy's testimony corroborated Jeff Van Gundy's story about the Rockets-Mavericks 2005 playoff series — the story for which Van Gundy was fined $100,000 for sharing with the media. It also appeared to corroborate what millions of witnesses saw in Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Kings.

Finally, the conspiracy theorists had their smoking guns. Or did they?

Yes, Mark Cuban complained to anyone who would listen about Yao Ming's screens in that '05 series. And there's no reason to doubt Van Gundy's story that the league responded to that criticism by instructing its officials to keep an eye on the screens. Especially if the league's own analysis of Games 1 and 2 revealed some missed calls on moving picks by Yao. But how is that unethical or some kind of breach of the public trust? The league is merely saying, "Hey, big guy, get set on those screens." The ever-globalizing NBA could not have had a vested interest in dispatching Yao and his 1.3 billion fans in the first round.

And yes, Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals was poorly officiated, but so was just about every other game in the series, including one in which Shaquille O'Neal fouled out even though the aggregate physical impact of his six fouls would not have measured one solid high-five.

That Lakers-Kings '02 and Mavs-Rockets '05 were such highly visible controversies hurts Donaghy's already-strained credibility on this issue. If there really was a widespread problem in the league, he should tell us something we don't know about a game we barely remember.

Sports Talk Radio

Like its political talk radio brother, sports talk radio never misses an opportunity to play the victim card.

We didn't lose because the other team played better defense and took the ball harder to the rim! No! We were cheated by the refs!

Any Laker fan listening to sports talk radio in Los Angeles following Boston's 38-10 foul-shooting advantage in Game 2 could have been whipped into a conspiracy-theory frenzy.

They're Just Bad

Some fans will invariably confuse incompetence with malfeasance. The fact is there are a lot of missed calls in every game. If those calls are missed at a 50-50 clip for each team there's no problem. But if they're missed 80-20 in favor of one team, the losing fans are going to want an FBI investigation.