A good NBA referee spends his career in anonymity. That was the case for veteran official Eric Lewis entering his 19th season this year. Lewis has officiated more than 1,000 NBA games in his career, and was in the crew for NBA Finals matchups between the Raptors-Warriors in 2019, Lakers-Heat in 2020, and Bucks-Suns in 2021. His resume is about as good as any referee in the league.
NBA ref allegedly caught with burner account defending his calls to Lakers fans on Twitter
Lakers fans are going to have a field day with this one.
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
Lewis’ career took a strange turn when he was in the spotlight for missing one of the most talked-about blown calls of the regular season. Lewis was the official who failed to call an obvious foul on Jayson Tatum when he made contact with LeBron James at the end of the Lakers-Celtics game in January. You may remember James falling to his knees on the court, and Patrick Beverley bringing a camera onto the court to show Lewis the play again.
Lewis officiated more Lakers games during the 2023 NBA Playoffs, and fans of the team were often complaining about him on social media. Lakers fans even uncovered photos of Lewis’ family wearing Celtics jerseys that we won’t link here. Well, it appears that Lewis was monitoring all of it on a burner account on Twitter under a different name. On Thursday, that account was deleted after someone identified that Lewis was behind it.
Here are the tweets of the account that allegedly belong to Lewis. Update: now the account is saying it’s Lewis’ brother:
People in the NBA really love their burners, don’t they? Bryan Colangelo’s burner (“Find a new slant!) remains my personal favorite, but this is up there.
Listen: being a ref is hard work. The game is happened so fast, and there are millions of people deeply invested with their emotions and their money that the game gets called to their liking. Instead of creating a fake Twitter account to defend yourself, I recommend Lewis and other officials just log off and touch grass.
Please: Do anything better with your time other than search your name on Twitter. Life is just too short.
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