Building a Following
The Impact of Social Media on the Public Image of NBA Players
Of the major North American sports, basketball is the most personal. Unlike baseball and football, there are fewer players on the court at the same time. Unlike football and hockey, the players don’t wear gaudy equipment that covers up their bodies and hides their emotions. Instead, basketball players are under the microscope in ways other star athletes never get to experience.
This is also why individual NBA players become household names in ways most stars from other leagues don’t reach. Mike Trout is arguably the greatest baseball player of all-time, how many casual sports fans could pick him out of a crowd? Ask any non-Canadian what Connor McDavid looks like and you’re more likely to have people asking you who that is instead of getting his physical description. But if you were to ask them about most current NBA stars, your percentages of getting an actual answer would skyrocket.
We feel more connected to NBA players and thus, we are more invested in their personal stories. This is why the NBA feels like the most soap opera-ish of the major sports leagues with its narratives and stories. And the way these narratives have been written has largely evolved over the course of the last 20 years.
Back in the day, narrative surrounding players would be controlled by media. Bill Russell won championships; he was a winner. Wilt Chamberlain collected personal accomplishments; he only cared about his own numbers. Magic Johnson’s charisma and smile made him a league golden boy. By contrast, Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s tendency for aloofness and willingness to speak out on various social issues branded him in the media as “difficult.”
Even Michael Jordan was not immune to the media trying to spin narratives around his name. Prior to winning championships, Jordan was labelled too selfish and strongheaded to succeed in the NBA. By the time he rose to the top of the league, that stubborn attitude had “evolved” into a more positively viewed pathological need to win. To the point that by then, the media was excusing Jordan punching his own teammates in practice because “look how badly this guy wants to win!”
That was then, today’s NBA stars are growing up in a completely different landscape. The rise of social media in the late 2000s has transformed how the narrative can be spun around NBA stars. Where the media was once the lead factor, players have never had more opportunities to write their own stories.
As Twitter was becoming a hot item around 2007–08, one of basketball history’s biggest stars, both literally and figuratively, became one of the site’s most prominent users. By then Shaquille O’Neal was onto the latter part of his legendary career but never known to back away from the spotlight, the Shaq and Twitter marriage seemed like an obvious match made in heaven.
It was a different world back then. Shaq might go onto the site to announce where he would be going to eat so that fans might catch a glimpse of the famous big man. Or he might post weird non sequiturs posing as jokes. Some days he might even post inspirational quotes that had been “Shaq”ified. There was even that one time he used the platform to lob a “yo mama” joke aimed at Kevin Hart’s mother.
Point being, Shaq was getting a lot of attention for his use of Twitter. It even came to the point that impostor accounts were popping up, pretending to be the Big Aristotle himself. The issue became so bad that when Twitter introduced its verification process, non other than Shaq became the first account ever to be verified by Twitter.
Shaq was always known to be gregarious in media appearances. What he was seeing with Twitter that many other players didn’t see initially was a chance to show even more personality. The more you can connect with fans, the more you become liked. The more you’re liked, the more advertising opportunities you’ll get.
He wasn’t the only NBA star of his era to start using social media as a way to sell himself as a brand. Steve Nash and Baron Davis made a Step Brothers spoof for a website called “Ibeatyou.com”, a site where users would challenge each other in various competitions.
Nash was an early adopter of this site and it was the likely muse for his idea for “Nash Vs”. That was a reality show in which he would compete against other pro athletes in their respective sports and an idea which his then-teammate Shaq eventually swept from under him, leading to Nash getting production credits on Shaq’s show.
Then there was Chris Bosh who saw YouTube as a way to show off his comedic chops as a means to endear himself to fans. He posted numerous funny videos, most famously his pitch for fans to vote him into the 2008 NBA All-Star game. Bosh did not win the fan voting, but he did garner a lot of support from his video, which went whatever you might call viral for 2008.
Bosh also had forums set up on his personal website and he would take the time to go onto these forums and answer some questions from his users. Being younger than Shaq or Nash, Bosh understood possibly even more how he could use this burgeoning social media scene as a way to make fans buy into him.
Around the same time, Gilbert Arenas was also becoming a blog superstar. He was endorsed by the league no less as his blog was one of the biggest features on NBA.com. Imagine telling someone in 2023 that Arenas was one of the league’s most publicized stars but for a brief moment, it was true. The blog featured tons of insane stories about his life (including a time when he pooped in some shoes as a prank.) In fact, this story I pulled from the wayback machine is one of the more mundane stories Gil ever wrote on the blog:
Relationships 101
I know everybody thinks life is perfect for an NBA player, but people get in arguments and I do too. Here’s the real story guys, of why I missed the EA Sports event in Canada.
It started out real simple. My girlfriend had to drive me to practice in the morning to go work out and I was looking in the car and I guess my daughter dragged sticks and rocks from outside and there was yogurt and stuff all on the floor in the backseat. So I’m thinking to myself, “Man, this car is filthy!” But instead of thinking it to myself, it slipped out and I said it out loud.
So now the cat was out of the bag and I was like, “Are you ever going to clean the car?” And just like a woman with kids is going to do, she hit me with, “I take care of the kids all day, and I don’t have time to do this, and do that, and do this and do that.” So I’m like, “OK, but this is my dad’s car and my dad keeps his car clean…”
It was about her registering her car, because she didn’t register her car. It’s been sitting in the garage for two months with no tags. So I’m like, “If you register your car, then I can get my dad’s car back and my dad’s car would be spotless and there would be no problem because you could have a party in your car if you want to. If you want to have a party, you and the kids, and y’all want to have a party and throw drinks around, hey, be my guest. That’s your car, you have to live with that mess, I don’t go in there.”
And then she got so frustrated with that, because she came back with, “I take care of the kids and if you want the car cleaned, you have to clean it.” So we was on 16th and Constitution and she kicked me out of the car and I had to walk all the way to the gym. It was probably a mile, but I had on smaller shoes. You know, I wear 13s, but I had on 12s because they matched the outfit I was wearing so my feet were hurting and I didn’t have any cab money to take a cab and that all played a part.
So I went on a strike.
I think all men should do this when they have a disagreement. This is Relationship 101. When you have a fight with “the other,” don’t answer their calls and don’t answer their pages. That usually gets the point across that you’re not talking to them. So, I held out for seven days. I went on strike for seven days and stayed at the gym for seven days. I slept in the gym. They got nice couches in there and it just kept me in the gym working on my knee and stuff.
So, back to the EA event, I didn’t have a passport or driver’s license to actually go to Canada because I was on strike and I didn’t want to go back to the house because she kicked me out. She kicked me out of the car on a Sunday, I had to wait till the following Sunday to talk to her again. Now we’re good. She just got her car registered two days ago, we’re waiting on that to be finalized but my dad’s car still looks like trash day.
You know, it’s “the life.” Everybody thinks we have easy lives, but hey, if you don’t want to argue and you don’t want to fight, take the high road and sleep in a gym.
But these are all guys who were already professionals by the time social media really exploded. They were adjusting to a new normal in real time. As the years went by new NBA draft classes entered the league and the younger they got, the more they had grown up with social media’s presence in every day life.
One of the “older” players of this new generation is Kevin Durant. Durant is the perfect microcosm of a player evolving in the social media age because his online presence has at different times boosted his public image or dimmed it.
On the positive side of the spectrum, KD’s online presence has allowed fans to see his weird but funny side, like when he felt the need to let the world know he would like to drink some used bath water and even doubled-down many years later.
He has also used his online presence to showcase his love of basketball. It’s often said that many NBA players don’t actually like watching or talking about the sport. Durant certainly has swerved the other way in this regard and made it known that like many of his fans, he’s a hoops junkie.
Then there’s the downside to players using social media. Kevin Durant has sort of become the poster boy for this too, he exists in both worlds positively, like he keeps transitioning between parallel universes. Like when he got caught talking shit about his old team on Twitter but forgot to switch to his burner account.
Or when he started getting into catfights with random fans on Twitter.
That’s the beauty of social media, you can expose your persona to potentially billions of people across the world. It’s also the downside to social media; you can expose your persona to potentially billions of people across the world.
Take for example the saga of James Harden and his face mask.
Harden wore the mask pictured above for his arrival in the NBA’s bubble during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. This coincided with George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police brutality. It was a tense time in the world as people were calling for the rightful prosecution of the murderous police officer. When Harden arrived in the bubble, the NBA happily tweeted about it.
The issue? Well, that mask that Harden was wearing was one representing “Blue Lives Matter.” A mask created to supporting police officers by people whose world views aligned a lot more closely to alt-right hate mongerers than the average NBA fan.
Harden faced a lot of public scrutiny for his choice of face wear. Even singer Trey Songz got in on the act and called the photo, “certified clown s***. I’ll say it for everybody who scared to.”
And this highlighted an entirely different issue for players on social media: the chance that they’ll be misunderstood or incorrectly labelled. Unfortunately for Harden, he didn’t have any idea what the mask he was wearing stood for, he just liked the style.
“Honestly, I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. I wore it because it covered my face, my beard. I thought it looked cool, that was it.”
Which was corobborated by Harden’s friend and famous rapper Young Thug… in his own words.
Harden’s mask issues highlights another potential drawback to players using social media. Nobody can be expected to know everything at every moment. Faux-pas happen so often but social media won’t let you off the hook so easily. One wrong misstep and you can become a pariah for something you didn’t even willingly do. Harden openly supported Black Lives Matter in interviews,
I think the world saw it. How so many people could come together so close, obviously it was for a tragic reason but the marching and everything we’re standing for is very powerful.
But for a lot of people, he was written off the minute he wore that mask and thrown into a lot he doesn’t belong. That can help explain why certain stars, like Kawhi Leonard who has three total original tweets, choose not to participate in social media at all. For someone like Leonard, the chance at improving his public image is not worth the chance at making the wrong move and destroying it.
Even for older players who didn’t grow up in the social media era, they’ve had the chance to potentially flip the narrative on how they were once perceived. Take for example the two Lakers legends I mentioned at the top: Magic and Kareem. Social media has definitely changed how these two are now viewed.
While Magic was the king of media and knew how to show up, smile and come off looking like a hero, social media has sort of exposed him for being a little shallow. It’s an ongoing joke that Magic while only tweet the most flaccid, obvious things and it feels like he’s constantly making an effort to not make any waves. Magic is a shrewd business man and he knows that showing any authenticity means potentially alienating clients. Instead, Magic is happy being corporate Magic and never saying anything meaningful to his broad audience.
On the other hand, Kareem, painted by the media as cagey and unapproachable has used social media to share his voice to the world. He has penned countless think pieces on powerful issues such as Black Lives Matter, abortion rights and Anti-Semitism.
These were the same types of issues that Kareem wanted to address during his playing days only he didn’t have the tools to do it himself. Instead, he had to speak through an almost entirely white media as an openly Muslim and black man.
The NBA of the 1970s was too black for its white audiences. Its players were making too much money. Too many stars were getting addicted to hard drugs. Unfairly, as the league’s best player, Kareem became the token for all of the NBA’s issues. Having to deal with all of this in a city like Milwaukee, it’s understandable that Kareem came to be jaded with the media and their pointed questions.
With the advent of the internet and the boom of social media, an older Kareem now has the chance to talk about the issues he wanted to address all along. He’s taken that chance with zero hesitation and run with it. Fans have gotten to see Kareem’s thoughtful side and many respect his willingness to speak out on issues no other current or former NBA player will approach.
Magic and Kareem couldn’t be further apart in how they’ve come to use social media and how it has effected their reputation. Just looking at where these two were then and now, the ability to go online and reach billions of people has definitely changed how NBA athletes can control their public image.
As Twitter starts fading into the background, a new app will take its place. Currently, Tik Tok seems to be the new trend. One need only to look at Ja Morant’s massive popularity to understand its appeal but you could also look at his recent personal struggles to understand its risks.
The more new generations of NBA players come into the league, the more we will be watching stars who grew up on social media. They will be savvier than those who came before them and it will be interesting to see how that changes the league moving forward. There are positives and negatives to this phenomenon but social media isn’t going away.
