ESPN reported that more than a third of the league’s referees were in COVID protocols at the end of December. But, as with players and coaches, the regular referees are, slowly, coming back. “We’re coming out of the worst of it,” NBA Senior Vice President, Head of Referee Development and Training Monty McCutchen said Tuesday, noting the combination of vaccines and boosters — all required by the league for officials to work NBA games this season — along with the antibodies produced in healthy people who have gotten the vaccines and boosters but nonetheless test positive. “That being said, we’ve had to lean on other people,” he said. “And we’ve been proud of their work. … We’ve lost, it seems to me, this ability to allow people a proper apprenticeship. We tend to want our first-year players to be immediate successes. We want our first-year coaches to be immediate successes. And, of course, refereeing is always judged up against this unreasonable standard of perfection, instead of where are they on their arc, and are they doing excellent for that arc of growth?”