Every NBA referee calls shooting fouls at a different rate, and it shows up in player stats. I pulled the official's name out of a text field nobody was reading, built profiles for 101 refs, and showed the variance is real (ANOVA p = 0.000003). It was hiding in plain sight.
Some officials suppress free throws for 84% of high-FTA players. Others amplify them. The 80th-percentile spread is 0.86 FTA/36, about a free throw per game for a starter. I built suppressor and amplifier profiles for every official and defense-adjusted FTA deltas for 40 players across 3,846 pairs.
Live
Across 51,130 Last Two Minute events, errors cluster in high-attention situations: traveling, defensive three-seconds, off-ball monitoring. They run up to 3.5× the baseline miss rate. Ordinary contact fouls are missed least often. The hardest plays to call are where refs screw up most.
Live
I studied 31 players looking for a common trigger for terrible playoff games. I didn't find one. What I found: players who lose free throws from the regular season to the postseason floor more often (r = -0.528, p = 0.002). Harden is a separate case. Jimmy Butler doesn't fit the pattern. The playoff whistle isn't league-wide. 15 of 31 players actually increase FTA rate.
Frozen archive
SSAC27 abstract. The paper version of what's on this site.