This episode of Nothing But Respect originated from a piece of internal Defector lore: Our colleague Ray Ratto possesses a bounteous and largely unpublicized trove of knowledge about NBA officials. This trove will occasionally reveal itself when someone complains about a call in Slack, only for Ray to respond by hitting them with some Gediminas Petraitis esoterica. He's been loath to write much about it, so we figured we would bring him on the podcast to talk it through.
Here on Nothing But Respect, every week is Rays Week. The three of us traced the history of referees as empowered art critics, groused about the creep of technologification into the practice, and laughed at the formal bios listed on the NBA Officials website. This was a really fun one!
You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!
