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The NBA has announced Natalie Sago will be among the list of 36 officials selected to work during postseason action.<\/p>\n
NBA referee Natalie Sago thought a bad call was about to take place. A bad phone call, that is.<\/p>\n
She was wrong.<\/p>\n
The NBA on Monday announced the list of 36 officials selected to work this season\u2019s SoFi Play-In Tournament<\/a> and first round of the 2026 NBA playoffs<\/a>. Sago is on the list, making her the third woman in league history \u2014 after Violet Palmer and Ashley Moyer-Gleich \u2014 to be picked for postseason work.<\/p>\n Sago got the word on Saturday from Albert Sanders, the NBA executive who runs referee operations. She was arriving at the airport in Salt Lake City when the call came in.<\/p>\n \u201cI see his name pop up and I was like: \u2018Oh boy, here we go. Did we screw something up in the game last night in Utah?\u2019\u201d said Sago, a veteran of more than 400 NBA games. \u201cBut then that phone call turned out to be a pretty awesome phone call.\u201d<\/p>\n Evidently, she\u2019s been involved in plenty of good calls.<\/p>\n Less than half of the NBA\u2019s referees each season get playoff assignments. Sago wondered when her chance would come; she and Moyer-Gleich were promoted to the league\u2019s full-time staff in 2018, when they became the fourth and fifth women in league history to reach that level. More have followed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re on a high wire with no net under you and you\u2019re depending on the person to catch you, you don\u2019t really care what gender they are,\u201d said Monty McCutchen, who oversees referee development and training for the NBA. \u201cWhat you care about is whether they\u2019ve been trained properly, and whether you can trust that they will be there for you when you need them. And that\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s really important that, in my opinion, we\u2019ve gotten right.\u201d<\/p>\n Playoff officials are selected, the league said, \u201cbased on key criteria assessed throughout the season: NBA Referee Operations grades and rankings, play-calling accuracy and team rankings.\u201d Further evaluations take place after each playoff round.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such an honor,\u201d Sago said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t be more excited and ready to just put on a performance for the other women coming behind me and all the young little girls that are going to be watching the playoffs.\u201d<\/p>\n Palmer worked nine playoff games from 2006-12; Moyer-Gleich worked two in 2024. Sago\u2019s first assignment this year \u2014 the league doesn\u2019t announce what referees are where until the day of the game \u2014 will be the 12th for a woman in NBA playoff history.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope it does become normal,\u201d Sago said. \u201cAs long as we can do the work and do it well and work hard, it\u2019s the same thing the men do on the staff. I just want us all to be NBA referees. I don\u2019t want to be known as, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re the fifth female hired in the NBA ever.\u2019 OK, great. I know that. But we\u2019re all the same people. We do the same job.\u201d<\/p>\n Referee list<\/p>\n The playoff referees are Ray Acosta, Brent Barnaky, Curtis Blair, Tony Brothers, Nick Buchert, John Butler, James Capers, Sean Corbin, Kevin Cutler, Eric Dalen, Marc Davis, JB DeRosa, Mitchell Ervin, Tyler Ford, Brian Forte, Scott Foster, Pat Fraher, Jacyn Goble, John Goble, Jason Goldenberg, Courtney Kirkland, Marat Kogut, Karl Lane, Mark Lindsay, Tre Maddox, Ed Malloy, Andy Nagy, Gediminas Petraitis, Kevin Scott, Ben Taylor, Josh Tiven, Justin Van Duyne, James Williams, Sean Wright, Zach Zarba and Sago.<\/p>\n Foster (262), Davis (218), Brothers (216), Capers (204), Zarba (173), John Goble (151), Malloy (150), Wright (104) and Corbin (100) have all worked at least 100 playoff games.<\/p>\n Sago \u2014 whose father has officiated basketball for more than 30 years \u2014 and Goldenberg are the two first-time selections to the playoff staff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NBA has announced Natalie Sago will be among the list of 36 officials selected to work during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":605087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,294500,590,85],"class_list":["post-605086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-natalie-sago","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}