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The current NBA referee lockout has been an occasion for many people to vent their terrible feelings about officials.

But even those who think the current NBA referees are the worst anywhere are in unison that replacements are somehow even worse than that.

As in, the NBA, with its massive spotlight and budgets -- presumably the dream destination of the world's best referees -- somehow can't find officials who are better than the ones we have.

Think about that. That means either the NBA is not hiring the best replacement referees, or the real referees are pretty good! Among the best in the world, in fact, right? (If they weren't, better replacements would be around, making themselves known.)

Now, there are two things making NBA referees seem worse than they are. Tim Donaghy is one ... and Tivo is the other.

The Donaghy point is obvious -- most fans see calls go against their team and suspect the game must be corrupt. It usually isn't, but this time it was.

Much more pervasive, though, and I'd argue more serious, is the current TV-viewing reality that, for the first 100 years or so of basketball, the five or ten bad calls per game just sort of slipped on by. Now, not one slips all season.

Every single questionable call is analyzed somewhere. For every 48 minutes of basketball played, I wonder how many thousands of times people somewhere hit that little rewind button, and grow disenchanted.

In slow motion, the mistakes are so obvious. But I'm here to tell you that watching NBA games in person, in real time -- in the manner in which they are refereed -- it's almost never clear that the referees are incompetent, and it's frequently amazing that they are so good. Anyone who is convinced that NBA referees have gotten worse after watching in slow motion instant replay, I encourage you to watch in the flesh when you can. You may still feel essentially the same way, but I'm sure you won't have nearly the same conviction.

In real time, the job appears impossible. If they get 95% of calls right that's proof, an objective person with a courtside seat would tell you, that referees are practically superhuman. But we don't have the ability for most fans to try that experiment. What we do have, however, is the ability to watch the 5% of calls that are bad, again and again. (I keep thinking highlight reels of referee mistakes can't be far off, and will be horrible for the NBA.)

Of course there could be bad apples -- incompetent, crooked, or whatever -- in the referee corps. They, of course, must be tossed. 

But in general, if firing them all wouldn't get us better refereeing, don't we all agree that, in the long run, the referees we will have are the ones we ought to have: More or less the same ones as last year?

It's hard to imagine that's not where we're headed.

If the return of the unionized NBA referees is inevitable, and they're not that far apart in their negotiations, why all the drama? It has been suggested it may be a show for the players (the NBA will so lock people out) who have their own more expensive negotiations on the horizon, which makes sense.

Ryan Schwan has another theory on Hornets247. Maybe the NBA wants fans to see replacement referees in action to make the current referees look better by comparison.

Think about it, the league's credibility depends on the likes of Steve Javie, Joe Crawford, Bennett Salvatore, Eddie F. Rush, Ken Mauer, Scott Foster and Bob Delaney.

Last season, those people and their colleagues took a series of beatings in the mainstream media and online.

Maybe David Stern wants you to live in a world of replacement referees for a few weeks.

It's a wholly unsupported theory. Whether it consciously motivated the lockout or not, I have no idea.

But the effect is real regardless. Unless the replacement referees shock the world, the NBA Referee Fan Club will expand, while referee critics are sure to quiet down, which is no small thing if you're in the business of building the NBA's credibility.