Up in the riggings

"'This is absolutely rigged for money or ratings, I’m not sure which,' Ayesha Curry, Stephen's wife, wrote on her Twitter account. 'I won’t be silent.'"

Ayesha later deleted the tweet. Yes, it's probably a bad idea to claim that a game that pays your husband many millions of dollars a year is "absolutely rigged"!

This rumor flies around among the fans of whichever playoff team loses a couple of games after going up: "The NBA just wants to extend the series!"

But we can tell that either it isn't true, or the NBA is really terrible at rigging: in the past 30 years, only five series have gone seven games, just barely more than the number (four) of 4-0 sweeps. Given we are seeing the two best teams in the league meet, we might expect the finals to be pretty even, and so it looks to me like the NBA's rigging, if occurring, is getting it no more seven-game series than we would expect from pure chance! Why, they might as well just let the teams play, and not risk facing the scandal of having rigged all of these series.

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