The American journalist Marc Stein claims to have flushed out a fake twitter account used by an NBA referee, Eric Lewis, in order to highlight his decisions and defend the work of his colleagues. ESPN and The Athletic, two sports outlets, continued Stein’s work and confirmed that the American basketball league was investigating Lewis’ links to an account opened in the name of Blair Cuttliff (@CuttliffBlair), created in November 2015.
With nineteen seasons and more than a thousand NBA matches on the clock, Lewis is an experienced referee, who has participated in several NBA Finals (in 2019, 2020 and 2021). Several players reacted on the twitter network, including Patrick Beverley, sanctioned this year for a technical foul by Lewis, during a match against Boston. The Lakers player had gone to get a photographer’s camera to show the referee a non-whistling foul on LeBron James.
This is not the first time fake twitter accounts have been exposed in the NBA. In 2020, Kevin Durant admitted to using several fake accounts to respond to fan criticism.