Ed Helms will play Donaghy in the inevitable movie.

NBA official Tim Donaghy bet on basketball, so he automatically must  join the Chicago Black Sox and Pete Rose as a pariah forever banned by his sport. That’s the way it is for all pro athletes and officials who are caught gambling on their games. There’s a zero-tolerance policy, right? No, not always.

Prior to the 1963 season, two of the NFL’s better players, Detroit defensive tackle Alex Karras and Green Bay running back Paul Hornung, were caught gambling multiple times on football games. Karras also was proven to have business ties to underworld figures. Pete Rozelle suspended each player for the ’63 season and reinstated them in 1964. No one would have questioned him if he had given both lifetime bans, but he chose not to. Hornung was eventually elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Karras regained All-Pro status in 1965 and became a successful NFL commentator and actor (most notably in Blazing Saddles and Victor/Victoria). How would their lives have turned out differently if they had been banned for life? Difficult to say. That doesn’t mean Rozelle made a right or wrong decision–he just made a different one. And that doesn’t mean that the gamblers deserve any leniency; they don’t.

Donaghy has gone on record saying that he believes Michael Jordan bet on basketball games and that was the real reason he left the NBA in the 1990s to try baseball. Would David Stern really have covered up that type of scandal to protect the NBA? It’s a harsh implication. There’s no proof he did and no reason to treat Donaghy’s word as gospel. But it’s easy to see that even something as seemingly black-and-white as athletes and officials gambling on their sport has some gray area.