NBA Twitter

Kylie Cheung on the future of the NBA fandom on X, FKA Twitter.

The year is 2015; it’s July, the NBA off-season and the boiling point for media and fan speculation about potential trades. The exact verbiage of Fox sports analyst Chris Broussard’s tweet about then-Dallas Mavericks center Deandre Jordan is seared—perhaps forever—into the brains of unsaid numbers of terminally online NBA fans: “Sources: [Mavericks owner Mark Cuban] is beside himself. Driving around downtown Dallas begging (thru texts) Jordan’s family for address to Deandre’s home.”

The varying Twitter-based NBA group chats I’m in continue to quote the tweet about Jordan’s impending trade to the Clippers—absurd to the point of poetry—verbatim, some eight years later.

My experience of NBA fandom on Twitter—known colloquially as “NBA Twitter”—is colored by a range of similarly absurd, similarly poetic memories. For example: a viral Twitter thread (I refuse to call it an “X” thread, sorry Elon!) that pledged to keep shrinking 6’1” Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young for every 25 likes, in the iconic photo of Young defending 6’10” Ben Simmons during their jaw-dropping match-up in the 2021 Eastern Conference semi-final.

Another example: In June 2023, 13x All-Star Kevin Durant hopped onto a Twitter Space to argue with users with ~300 followers about whether he’s a top five player in the league. The appearance was as delightful as it was unsurprising—this is Kevin Durant, the generationally talented player who accidentally exposed his burner account by arguing with a rando in 2017 about his decision to leave the OKC Thunder. (“KD can’t win with those cats,” he wrote, inadvertently from his main account.)

This is NBA Twitter, the at-times delightful, always deranged corner of the internet where name-searching NBA players and obsessive fans unite, where Serious™ Sports Reporters can fuel years-long running jokes with a single quote graphic, where adult men write elaborate and earnest fan fiction about their favorite players. It’s the reason a not-insignificant number of basketball fans truly believe Sixers guard James Harden dons a “fatsuit” to get traded when he wants to leave a team. (And, of course, where Kanye West briefly ground the world to a halt by accusing Chris Paul of cheating with Kim Kardashian in a tweet that was shockingly absurd, even for him.) But as Twitter implodes before our eyes, does this rag-tag community have a future elsewhere?

Despite Twitter’s endless self-inflicted wounds under the leadership of a right-wing billionaire afflicted by a midlife crisis, nascent Twitter alternatives like Threads and Bluesky are still struggling to attract Twitter users and recreate Twitter-specific communities—like, say, NBA Twitter. Katie Heindl, a Toronto-based NBA writer, host of the beloved Basketball Feelings podcast, and author of the forthcoming book of the same name, is one of many NBA media personalities who attribute their professional success to humble beginnings connecting with other fans on NBA Twitter. Rival apps are fighting an uphill battle for the coveted NBA fanbase, she says, because NBA Twitter serves as a “living, breathing historical document.” Where else, Heindl asks, might we find NBA Twitter’s ancient, sacred texts—like, say, Durant’s 2011 tweets begging to drink Scarlet Johansson’s bathwater, or Devin Booker’s numerous, earnest childhood posts about Applebee’s and “Hooters with the fellas”?

Jasmine Watkins, the prolific NBA tweeter who works with Nike Virtual Studios, recounts her favorite memory on NBA Twitter: Kobe Bryant, her all-time favorite player, quote-tweeted one of her posts about him in assent. But in the last year since Elon Musk’s takeover, the platform has become increasingly unusable: “You don’t know who with blue checks you can trust now, or you’re forced to engage with them,” she says. Misinformation and unchecked harassment are rampant across all corners of the platform since Musk cut key staffers who once oversaw these issues, and now NBA Twitter has been directly affected: Last month, Musk helped fan the flames of conspiracy theories that LeBron James’ son, Bronny, was hospitalized due to health complications caused by the Covid vaccine.

Max Tani, a media reporter at Semafor who’s reported on Twitter’s Musk-era struggles, and a gleeful NBA Twitter participant when he’s off-the-clock, doubts that behaviors like this from Musk will help with retaining NBA stars on the platform. “The players are part of what makes NBA Twitter what it is, so alienating them can only hurt,” he says. Tani is personally well-acquainted with the looming, magnetic presence of NBA players on the platform. In fact, many of them name-search: In 2020, Ben Simmons personally DM’ed Tani to correct his tweet mistakenly claiming Simmons only endorsed Joe Biden after the election. To Tani’s point, perhaps the most effective promo for Threads was Durant’s tweet shortly after its July launch: “On threads with the burner. Come find me.”

Of course, it’s not just NBA players whose migration to Threads sparked excitement on the burgeoning Twitter alternative: When ESPN’s Adrian “Woj” Wojnarowski and The Athletic’s Shams Charania—the two titans of NBA media—appeared on the app and began sharing breaking NBA news on it, this provided Threads with a degree of “legitimacy,” Sports Illustrated staff writer Rohan Nadkarni tells me. In contrast, discourse about the NBA is next to nonexistent on Bluesky thus far: “When I see an NBA post on Bluesky, I’m like, ‘Who is this for?’ It feels so much more out-of-context,” he says, agreeing with Heindl’s appraisal of Twitter as a “historical document” deeply rooted in running jokes and contexts spanning well over a decade. For example, one of Nadkarni’s favorite bits: Particularly horny tweets are met with a photo of commentator and former NBA player Mark Jackson, who once mentioned in passing during a 2018 NBA Finals game that he’d have sex with James’ wife, Savannah. How do you organically recreate running memes like this elsewhere?

Woj and Shams’ presence on Threads is significant, Nadkarni says, because “if big accounts like this decided, ‘we’re Threads exclusive,’ that’d probably be what’s needed to take NBA Twitter entirely to a different platform.” News-breaking accounts might not actively, deliberately participate in the jokes and gags that make NBA Twitter what it is, but Nadkarni points out it's their scoops that are the basis for all of this. Tani agrees that major NBA media accounts going exclusive with a Twitter alternative could, indeed, be the catalyst that sends NBA Twitter elsewhere—but it’s not the only piece of the equation.

Meta’s leadership has asserted that Threads’ mission is to be a “friendly” space, a mission statement that’s reinforced when most of its user-base is tied to Instagram and Facebook accounts where people follow grandparents, uncles, even elementary school teachers. But Twitter—and particularly NBA Twitter—are “fueled by hate,” Tani says. (This is, almost verbatim, a Kevin Durant tweet.) For better and worse, some of NBA Twitter’s most iconic contributors are anonymous, faceless accounts that exist to dunk on both players and other users. It thrives because it’s a nasty, catty, hilarious place populated by grown men telling each other to kill themselves over heated debates about where Steph Curry ranks in the all-time list. Threads, by contrast, is a text-based reproduction of Instagram.

Still, of all the factors that hinder Twitter alternatives’ chances of success, NBA Twitter’s vibrant history strikes me as one of the greatest barriers: There’s so much that you just had to be there for. How am I to explain to a Threads user native to Instagram why a post that’s a clear lie is being inundated with photos of LeBron James on his phone? (James, as NBA Twitter knows, has an endearing history of embellishing the truth and retroactively implying he predicted the future.) How am I to share a digital community with an NBA fan unfamiliar with the 2019 tweet following the Raptors’ championship that asserts, “kyle lowry has a ring and a fat ass. a lot of you bitches cant relate”? There are NBA fans and there are NBA Twitter fans, all toxic to varying degrees. At the very least, NBA Twitter fans are usually funny and self-loathing.

Ultimately it’s important to put all of this in perspective: Twitter is 17-years-old; Bluesky and Threads materialized months ago, and the former is still in a beta version. More perspective: We’re still in the off-season. Tani, Nadkarni, and Heindl believe the real test of Twitter alternatives’ ability to compete for the affections of NBA Twitter will begin with the regular season in October.

But while Watkins recognizes that the off-season is always a slower time on NBA Twitter—that is, beyond manic trade speculation—this one is giving her some pause. “It’s always a downtime, but this year just feels a little different because it's under new leadership,” she says. “So I'm very, very anxious to see if it’s relatively back to normal when the season starts. If people start seeing ‘rate limit exceeded,’ that’ll drive them away super quick.”

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