National Post (National Edition)
NBA PLAYERS ARE POSTING UP AWAY FROM THE COURT
SOCIAL MEDIA WAY OF LIFE FOR LEAGUE’S STARS
Jason Terry knows he’s breaking the rules, but he can’t help it. In the Milwaukee Bucks’ locker-room 75 minutes before a matchup with the visiting Washington Wizards, the veteran guard’s eyes are lowered in deep inspection of his phone.
This season, the Bucks — not the team, but the players — implemented a rule: stay off your phone before games. Players are only allowed to navigate music playlists. There is an exception for guys with certain pre-game routines such as Terry’s video poker habit, which the 40-year-old has long used as a way to ease his mind before taking the court. But general phone use — and especially social media — is off limits.
“This is the time to get focused,” Terry says.
But he isn’t watching the monitor showing Wizards game footage or playing video poker. He’s busted: the lull of the moment draws him to his email. The phone — as ubiquitous in an NBA workspace as Xs and Os on the whiteboard — has the locker-room veteran breaking the rules.
“I mean, it’s addictive,” Terry says.
NBA players are a special breed, blessed with skill and athleticism, yet they are not unlike most of us: they, too, are obsessed with checking their phones, thumbing through Twitter and liking photos on Instagram.
The NBA social-media boom began in 2009 in Milwaukee’s locker-room when then-Bucks player Charlie Villanueva sent a tweet during halftime of a game against the Boston Celtics. The message was harmless, if superfluous: Villanueva shared with his followers that he needed to step up in the second half. His coach at the time, Scott Skiles, chastised Villanueva afterward for creating the perception that he was not focused. Before the start of the following season, the league introduced a rule banning cellphone usage during games.
Players now operate within these rules while otherwise tweeting and sharing with abandon. Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant was caught using a secret account to defend his honour against haters. After being traded to the New Orleans Pelicans, Nikola Mirotic seemingly trolled his former Chicago Bulls teammates by posting a shrug emoji moments after they gave up a late lead and lost to the Philadelphia 76ers. Those Sixers, by the way, feature the NBA’s king of Twitter.
All-star centre Joel Embiid discovered his social-media voice when he lost his entire rookie season to injury. He played a lot of video games, but got bored and started tweeting — needling Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James for a reply and requesting dates with singer Rihanna.
“I just figured that social media would be a way for me to have fun and that’s how I got into it — that summer that I got drafted,” says Embiid, who now boasts more than two million Instagram followers and another 1.27 million on Twitter. “From there, I guess it took off.”
For the NBA’s millennials, this is a way of life because they have been wired to smartphones since childhood.
Before an early season game in Washington, four of the six Phoenix Suns players in the visitors’ locker-room were checking their social-media feeds less than 70 minutes before tip-off and the two abstaining were eventually pulled in by rookie Josh Jackson showing off an Instagram post. Then again, that scene isn’t particularly surprising — the Suns have the NBA’s youngest roster by average age, causing interim head coach Jay Triano to joke, “No alcohol in there, please. It’s not allowed.”
Memphis Grizzlies rookie Dillon Brooks says he has tried to break his college habit of checking his phone — curious to see the instant reactions after he hit a big shot or flopped theatrically for the Oregon Ducks — but once he got to the NBA and saw teammates glued to their devices, he followed suit.
Wizards forward Kelly Oubre Jr., 22, has more than 530,000 followers between his Twitter and Instagram accounts. He is equally likely to retweet a Zen message from Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi as he is to mock a lifestyle Twitter account for not including him among the best dressed players in the NBA. He carries two phones and will often pick up one immediately after participating in the team’s morning shootaround. But he wishes he wasn’t so much like his peers.
“I hate it,” Oubre says. “It’s a generational thing, I would say for sure. It’s something that I really don’t like — the stereotype about my generation. I feel like we’re too dependent on the cellphones and the social media to hype our egos and make us feel good when, at the end of the day, that comes from yourself. It’s just a crutch, honestly. I call it the SMD — the social-media disease.”
Oubre may have a point, according to what Jim Taylor has observed in his clients. Taylor, who specializes in sports psychology and has worked with athletes from the NBA, NFL and MLB, believes social media can be distracting. Before several of his clients set off for Pyeongchang, South Korea, to compete in the Winter Olympics, he recommended they shut off their phones.
Terry gets chastised by his kids for using a phone that’s a few generations out of date and he’s heckled by young teammates who implore him to join Instagram and Snapchat. But Terry’s fine with having just Twitter and a few apps. Besides, he’s already trying to break the addiction.
IT’S JUST A CRUTCH... I CALL IT THE SMD — THE SOCIAL-MEDIA DISEASE.