All 30 NBA Teams Ranked By Ref Quality

Find out the referee quality (RefScore) of your favorite team.

Last week, I teased a little mystery about how the NBA distributes its top referees.

Why do certain teams receive higher quality officials than others?

The question hangs over the Top 10 and Bottom 10 RefScore leaderboards that I unveiled last week on The Finder. To get you up to speed, RefScore is my fancy-pants metric that estimates referee quality based on the NBA’s assignments. You can catch the Top Top here and the Bottom 10 here along with the methodology, notes on each team and what it means for this upcoming season. 

In this post, I’m going to quickly reveal the Middle 10 teams in RefScore and then start to explore the big question at the top.

The Middle 10

11. Toronto – 3.050 RefScore

Surprisingly strong crew chiefs considering they were barely on national TV.

12. Memphis – 3.047 RefScore

Most experienced crews in the league (41 years a night).

13. Denver – 3.033 RefScore

The champs won’t be this low this upcoming season.

14. Chicago – 3.015 RefScore

Look for this to tumble despite being the home of three Finals refs.

15. Atlanta – 3.010 RefScore

Average except for this fact: more refs live in Atlanta than any other NBA city.

16. Indiana – 3.005 RefScore

Only once on national TV, but received more Finals refs than Knicks.

17. Portland – 2.984 RefScore

No refs live call Pacific Northwest home, but outranked some playoff teams.

18. Sacramento – 2.976 RefScore

They’ll probably be Top 10 next season given national TV boost.

19. New Orleans – 2.976 RefScore

Playoff-caliber referees didn’t spend much time in the Big Easy.

20. Miami – 2.975 RefScore

As if the Heat needed another chip on their shoulder.

OK, that’s the Middle 10. Let’s put it all together with loads of data you can’t get anywhere else.

Behold, the full 30-team leaderboard with number of national TV games, win percentage (WPct), average years of experience (YrExp), reigning Playoff referees (PlayRefs), reigning Finals referees (FinRefs), Rookie referees (Rookie) and Finals referees net of Rookie referees.

In all its color-gradient glory.