Fans found the Twitter account of NBA referee Eric Lewis

The NBA officiating conversation has gotten a bit out of hand lately, as complaints about calls and no calls seem to become a dominant topic every night. For the most part, fans on Twitter just scream into the void (either mentions of NBA Officials or the main NBA account go unanswered), but there is one account that was ready to defend the honor of officials: o At least one official.

NBA Twitter was enthralled Thursday by the saga of @CuttliffBlair, a since-deleted Twitter account with no followers that only followed the NBA, NBA officials, NBA referees, Ref Analytics and to George Mason’s women’s basketball team (which, I’ll get to in a minute). The account had one purpose: to defend referee Eric Lewis in the mentions of seemingly anyone who tweeted about him in a negative light, particularly during the Western Conference Finals, where he drew the ire of some Lakers fans.

It certainly fits the profile of a Burner account and since it was removed after all of this went viral, it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than the Lewis account, it was also apparently recorded on Lewis’s AOL email. As for the accounts he followed, the various NBA ones make a lot of sense, but George Mason’s women’s team account seemed strange, until you find out that his wife coaches there.

That makes it hard to imagine how this isn’t an account he handled, and while it’s totally understandable why you’d want to defend yourself when you’re facing constant accusations of being terrible at your job or being a crooked arbitrator, it’s also just not something with what you should worry about if you are an NBA referee. Prepaid accounts seem like a good idea at the time, but if only use the account to defend yourself, you’ll eventually get someone’s attention, especially since as an NBA referee, no random person will be out there defending their honor so vigorously. This It’s not that important As the Brian Colangelo burner account situation, but it’s still wild enough to make him one of the top characters on NBA Twitter right now.

Arbitration is a very difficult and thankless job, and the discourse about it is as toxic as ever. Still, it’s probably best to log out and do your best to ignore Twitter, because getting caught like that will only make things worse.