Rasheed Wallace believes Tim Donaghy didn't act alone. He thinks the NBA has its own grassy knoll, where another rogue referee (or a few) played his or their parts in a monumental conspiracy that somehow may wind up with David Stern and Vince McMahon as tag-team partners in a sinister sports syndicate.
Recall that Wallace was the first to make that comparison in October 2007 -- "This ain't basketball anymore," he said at the time, "it's entertainment" -- during the embryonic stages of the Donaghy scandal.
"Everybody thought I was a liar and a militant," Wallace told Boston reporters this past week. "But now the truth is coming out."
Donaghy, released in November after serving an 11-month prison sentence, is on a media tour promoting his book about the scandal. In the book, Donaghy attempts to further taint whatever sanctity was left among NBA referees by saying personal grudges are held against certain players.
One instance Donaghy discussed during an interview with "60 Minutes" last week came early in the 2006-07 season. Allen Iverson had threatened referee Steve Javie during a game and the league saw fit to merely fine the superstar player. Other referees thought it wasn't enough punishment, so according to Donaghy, refs conspired to make Iverson pay in the next game with biased calls.
Another accusation came against veteran referee Dick Bavetta, who Donaghy said would make calls in favor of underdog teams just to keep games competitive.
Give credit to work by former Newsday reporter Ken Berger of CBSSports.com, who went back to game tapes to find that Iverson was not notably penalized by calls in his next game, nor did Javie make any overzealous calls against Iverson in games he called after the incident.
ESPN.com blogger Kevin Arnovitz worked with an economist to see if anyone would have benefited by picking the underdog in games officiated by Bavetta. What they learned was one actually would lose money if they followed Donaghy's theory on Bavetta.
But no matter how many legends are debunked, the skepticism will always exist. Why? Because as long as humans are charged with calling balls and strikes, fouls and penalties, the human element must be involved, whether it involves error or emotion.
Should referees be held to the highest level of unbiased judiciousness? Certainly. But it would be naive to believe there aren't at least one or two bruised egos who are lost to the dark side for the sake of revenge. In Donaghy's case, it was for the sake of money.
But is the fix really in? If so, the players generally aren't aware of it -- even if one player thinks it is. Wallace even compared it to the betting scandals that rocked college basketball in the early 1950s.
"And when that came out, how hard it hit and how hard it hit collegiate basketball, that's how this one is going to do," Wallace said. "It's going to hit hard. I'm just glad that I'm not him or none of these execs in the league."
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