L2M reports: Which NBA referees make the fewest mistakes?

No one is perfect, not even the best at their craft. That’s the case with NBA officials, who have to make decisions in tenths of a second while overseeing some of the fastest and most physical basketball players in the world. To determine who the …

No one is perfect, not even the best at their craft. That’s the case with NBA officials, who have to make decisions in tenths of a second while overseeing some of the fastest and most physical basketball players in the world. To determine who the best are at making those tough decisions, we’re digging deep into the league’s Last Two Minute (L2M) reports.

The NBA doesn’t publish full game reports, but the L2M has become a useful tool to identify which referees have been most accurate under pressure. Although the available data doesn’t assign individual judgments to specific referees, but rather to the entire crew, we can still analyze the accuracy of officials with at least 1,000 appearances in L2M decisions since 2015-16.

(Data crunching courtesy of Ali Mohammad Tayeb and Alberto de Roa).