If Tim Donaghy was working an NBA game between 2003 and 2007, there’s a good chance the fix was in. That’s the takeaway from ESPN’s two year investigative article, “How former ref Tim Donaghy conspired to fix NBA games.”

The article is a fascinating deep dive into the entire history of the Tim Donaghy scandal. It covers how the referee slowly progressed from an honest official, to one playing in the gray areas of NBA betting rules, to when he started flat out betting on games he himself was betting on.

There are two fairly significant revelations the article gets to that either weren’t obvious before, or were barely covered by the media. The first is the initial discovery by sports book traders that the games were being bet on, and their attempt to capitalize on the action rather than stamp down on it. The second is the potential cover-up by the NBA of suspected match fixing. Both issues raise significant questions about the integrity of the league, and where it now stands that sports betting is spreading across America.

Regarding the first discovery, the article discussed a group nicknamed The Animals, who first discovered the odd betting pattern on Donaghy games in 2003. Rather than shut down the action and report it to authorities, the group began betting the patterns themselves, potentially raking in hundreds of millions. The key was to do it without alerting other books. They bet enough to get rich, but not super rich. As the article puts it: