Best Podcasts to Listen to: Whistleblower

Photo Credit: (https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/whistleblower-41446)

Sports, and the NBA in particular, are a significant interest of mine, and the podcast Whistleblower did a good job of investigating one of the biggest NBA scandals of all time.

Tim Donaghy is a former NBA ref most famous for being the ref charged with manipulating the results of the NBA games. He manipulated NBA games because he or people he knew had bet on the games he was reffing, and since he was reffing he could influence the game towards his side of the bet.

In the podcast Whistleblower, the investigative team does a deep dive into what exactly happened, and whether or not the manipulating of NBA games by refs went deeper than just Tim Donaghy. While Tim Donaghy was the ref who got caught, the podcast makes the argument (from a bunch of interviews with people familiar with the scandal) that there is a significant likelihood it was not an isolated incident.

A lot of information in the podcast is nothing new if you are a basketball fan, such as referees having implicit biases or star players getting favorable calls. However, it is always good to learn more about the NBA and exactly how it operates, as this way fans are more knowledgable about why certain incidents take place. Also, while the ref scandal seems to be more about influencing betting lines than the games themselves, this is also great information to know as a potential sports bettor.

If you are an NBA fan or just curious about learning more about the world of sports in general, Whistleblower is a podcast worth checking out!

Whistleblower Recommendation Rating: 2.5

This post has now been updated to reflect a new ratings system that I have implemented, which is scored as follows:

1: Something worth checking out if you have time

2: Something that is a hit for some people, but not a must for everyone

3: Something worth prioritizing if interested

4: Something worth making time to check out

5: An absolute home run, worth going out of your way for

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