I am not in the least bit surprised that its true.
I didn't become a hardcore fan until the years when the C's weren't so good. As a new fan, whenever they got a bad call, or a bad break, I chalked it up to the same thing that everyone else said: young, inexperienced, and sucky teams are going to get the bad end of a call.
But this year, everything changed in terms of the team dynamic. However, I kept on seeing bad calls. I soon realized that the reason the NBA has poor officiating is because they choose to have poor officiating (I have stated this many times here). The have the financial resources, technology, and manpower to improve their officiating. However, they don't. This can only mean that they want to have poor officiating, and whatever their motivation is to do that, its not respectable.
My theory has been that it was solely to keep games close, and thus interesting. After all, most viewers tune in during the fourth quarter to see if its a close game, and many shut a game off if its a big point differential. Heck, people in the arenas even leave if the game isn't close. I never imagined that they would try to determine the outcome of the games. But, with a ref that felt confident enough in the outcomes of games to bet on them, and with a classic LA vs Boston finals this year, after two highly unlikely trades to get that to happen, at this point nothing would surprise me. The only thing I really wonder is just how deep the influence on games propagates through the league.
I take solace in the fact that I know there is nothing the refs can do to make a spectacular shot go down or a pass thread the needle. I still like watching basketball, and I'm really glad I get to watch my favorite players for a few more games, but I haven't taken the scoreboard too seriously for several months now. I know when a team plays bad, or good, and to me watching good basketball is enough.