NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - This weekend we're going to see referees making a lot of tough calls, from the Tyson-Lewis fight, to the Red Wings vs. Hurricane play-offs, and another round of World Cup games. But that's nothin' compared to the tough call the nation's business cycle referees are going to have to make, perhaps in the next few weeks.

I'm referring to the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER. Their motto: "Since we're NBER's, we call the ends," of recessions. That's because since the 1950's they have had the responsibility for tracking business cycles.

In the next few days, the NBER will likely issue an update on how close they are to calling the economy officially in recovery (the business cycle dating committee typically posts an update a few days after the monthly employment report is released). When they do, the continued rise in jobs, however meager and disappointing, could be highlighted as a key element showing the economy is out of recession and solidly into recovery.

Why does it matter when the NBER says recession is over and recovery has begun? Because it helps put the current behavior of the economy in perspective, and may encourage us all to be a little more patient with the "slow" pace of job creation we are seeing thus far.

The NBER looks at four factors to date a recession: employment, industrial production, real personal income, and business sales -- with job creation, or destruction, being the most important variable. Industrial production started to gain momentum in January after contracting for 15 of the previous 16 months. Jobs (known as non-farm payrolls in the monthly employment report) posted their first net monthly increase in April, and then it was by a tiny 6,000 workers.

A piece of good news lost in today's employment report shuffle -- and big stock market volatility -- was the April wholesale inventories report. Even econoheads like this one often ignore this report, but at this juncture it's noteworthy because inventories fell by 0.7 percent and sales jumped 1.6 percent, the biggest increase in nearly three years -- another hopeful sign that demand is building, feeding into sales, and ultimately setting the groundwork for more jobs growth.

Jobs growth is now being seen as disappointing, and there's a lot of talk of a jobless recovery. But let's look at history, assuming that maybe the recovery only began in the first quarter of the year, when industrial production started growing and employment finally positioned itself to stop declining. How do things stack up then?

In fact, jobs growth measured on a year-over-year basis looks like this coming out of recession (first month of expansion): 1990 down 1.6 percent, 1981 down 3.0 percent, 1973 down 3.6 percent. And what is that number as of April? Down 1.7! Not to say that's when the recession ended, because no one knows for sure, but this makes it pretty clear that jobs growth is ALWAYS weak early in a recovery. It isn't atypical.

Another little nugget to put things in perspective: A lot of interesting commentary today on how long it took for jobs to start growing after the 1990-91 recession, the last time there was discussion of a jobless recovery. But if you were around then and following economic issues, there was also some debate and some surprise over how the NBER set the date for the END of that recession. A lot of people thought and still think that the recession actually lasted longer than the NBER said it did, and that's why unemployment stayed high for so long.

Just something to think about as you channel surf madly from Nets and Lakers to the Belmont Stakes and back again.