NBA Twitter can’t be “rate limited”
Elon Musk can’t stop NBA Twitter.
There are 3 things that are guaranteed within the life of an NBA fan: death, taxes and “Woj bombs.” The NBA goes through a trilogy of phases every given year with its regular season, postseason and the offseason. The latter of which features no basketball being played with actual stakes (Summer League does not count), but often asserts itself as the most exciting portion of the NBA timeline. Ironically, the 24-hours news cycle became the standard of cable television with a sports-adjacent narrative regarding the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994–1995, but there was a lack of control felt by most viewers in having to be on standby for something significant to occur. In the age of streaming and social media though, news still breaks and it can still be a momentous occasion, but there is no fear of missing out when everything is archived in some shape or form. Nobody nowadays wants to watch a 45-minute broadcast for the sake of discovering a new tidbit about their favorite players, thus Twitter became the ideal cornucopia for all things NBA news related.
The NBA was the most popularly referenced sports league on Twitter in 2018, with its more than 100-million Tweets in 2018 by the end of May. Twitter can turn regular NBA fans into digital celebrities who range from totally anonymous and under the guise of a pseudonym, to industry insiders like Shams Charania and Adrian Wojnarowski. Other accounts like Hardwood Paroxysm and numerous team-oriented accounts like Cone (Oklahoma City Thunder) and Bradeaux (Houston Rockets) discover lanes where they can engage with like-minded fans, or better yet, those who vehemently disagree and can attract online attention through debates and arguments. Sometimes these discussions are constructive and level-headed, but trolls often suck in most of the timeline’s air with absurd memes and outlandish takes that ESPN anchors like Kendrick Perkins and Stephen A. Smith wouldn’t even consider. The most prominent producers of such content are Ballsack Sports, Buttcrack Sports and BrickMuse. All of whom highlight the lowlights of the NBA stratosphere, deliberately spread misinformation that ranges from believable to inconceivable or simply exude pseudo-confidence over their knowledge about a league that they have set out to mess with. Ballsack Sports’ quite literally has a single post pinned on his account that is followed by over 260,000 people, where he satirically explains how to sort out fake news. Meanwhile, his most recent tweet is a joke about how #3 pick of the 2023 NBA Draft, Scoot Henderson, is succeeding Damian Lillard with the Portland Trail Blazers’ #0 jersey in honor of the veteran who just requested a trade from his career-long stint at the organization.
The day of Lillard’s trade request also highlighted the negative attributes of relying on the 24-hours news cycle of a social media platform run by a specific individual in charge. On July 1st, it was announced that the future hall-of-famer would be seeking a move elsewhere, an absolute behemoth of an announcement for a player whose persona has been steeped in loyalty and dedication. This was the perfect time for Twitter CEO Elon Musk to covertly implement new technical features on to Twitter that would limit every single user, paying subscriber or not, to a specific number of posts that they could view per day. Considering that each person’s Twitter timeline is virtually infinite depending on how many accounts they follow, this was an imminent existential crisis for the platform that so many depended on for news about any personal interest. It was particularly perilous due to it occurring at the peak of NBA free agency and Lillard’s announcement, which would have assumably glued millions of eyeballs to their Twitter feeds for hours on end. While the platform has returned to normal after an immeasurable degree of criticism towards Musk, it forced users, and specifically NBA fans, to seek out their most trusted sources in order to appropriately use their fleeting amount of accessible content. This pressurized force resulted in a diamond in the rough of NBA Twitter: @droppindimes20.
Droppindimes20, also known as The Amateur NBA Analyst, has become an enigma in the lore of NBA free agency. He disappears and reappears only for those who are quick enough to screenshot his Tweets to appreciate in the moment. The Amateur NBA Analyst is effectively the loch ness monster for the NBA reporting industry; we don’t know where he/she came from, but they have established themselves as a threat to the mainstream likes of Wojnarowski and Charania. On June 30th, the Analyst revealed that the Miami Heat would be getting a superstar from the Pacific Northwest. A day later, Charania announced Lillard’s trade request with the Heat as his desired destination.
Theories have surrounded the origin of the NBA Analyst. Are they related to an NBA executive? Is it Charania or Wojnarowski trying to prove that they can thrive on Twitter without their name-brand attachments? Is it the burner account for an NBA executive who wants to sway narratives towards a particular path? The Analyst has claimed he used to work for in the NBA, as well as at an “agency”, but nobody has any true sense of his connections to the league. As many were scurrying Twitter for verified sources on NBA news during the “rate limit” fiasco, the Analyst was a safe haven for his scarce, but bluntly accurate, information leaks. While the NBA Analyst is currently nowhere to be found for now, I rest assured that he will return when the depths of NBA Twitter needs him to.
