Disclaimer about Referee Stats

Referees are a much maligned group. Part of the problem is they have a very subjective job. It isn't made any better by the fact that good hard stats aren't collected about referee performance. A standard boxscore lists only the three officials that called the game. While referees have a direct impact on game flow, called turnovers, deadballs, jumpballs, etc. the only thing in the boxscore we can directly attribute to a ref are fouls (and ejections).

At StatSheet.com you can find information about the number of games refs have called and how many personal fouls, technical fouls, and ejections they are responsible for. If you think a group of refs called a game particularly close, you can see if that matches their average fouls per game over the season. However, there are some caveats to be aware of:

1. Boxscores list three officials per game. I have no way of associating specific foul calls to specific refs. As a result, I associate the number of fouls called in a game with each ref. It is entirely possible that one ref out of the three was particularly bad, which won't be accounted for. However, many refs officiate numerous games so their average over a large number of games should be fairly representative.

2. Since I only have the first and last name of each ref that called a game, it is possible that two refs with the same will be treated as one person on StatSheet.com. If this becomes a problem over time, I'll come up with an algorithm to distinguish two refs with the same name.

3. A bigger problem is the fact that referee names are horribly inconsistent in boxscores. Just browse a few and you'll see what I mean. I'll need to fix this on my end some way (probably manually), but until then expect anomalies in the data.