TWITTER SLAM DUNK FOR NBA
League has embraced concept of giving fans, players a live voice through social media
Shea Serrano has a routine for the NBA playoffs, one that’s pretty common among the basketball obsessed these days.
For big games, the author and journalist will plant himself alone in front of a television to watch the action with thousands of friends and strangers.
He’s immersed in NBA Twitter, the organic community of fans and personalities that has changed the way fans experience the sport.
“To me, it’s becoming more fun than watching in real life with a bunch of people,” said Serrano, one of NBA Twitter’s most prominent voices and a writer for the Ringer website.
“I know for me, I mostly like to be by myself. But this is away for me to be by myself but also not really all alone.”
On social media, there’s nothing like NBA Twitter.
It’s a sports bar that doesn’t close, a barbershop with unlimited seating, a family cookout where the NBA stars show up to hang.
“More people might watch the NFL on TV, but when it comes to consuming a sport through the internet, I don’t think anything ’s close to the NBA,” said Rob Perez, more commonly known by his Twitter handle @World_Wide_ Wob, which has propelled him from unknown to virtual celebrity.
The NBA is the most tweetedabout sports league in 2018, according to Twitter, with more than 100 million NBA-related tweets during this year’s playoff run.
The most mentioned athlete in the United States last year was LeBron James, and the most mentioned team was the Cleveland Cavaliers. With James being the face of the league, and expected to test free agency this summer, NBA Twitter should be all-consuming these next few weeks.
Adding fuel to the twitter rage was the news suggesting Bryan Colangelo, the Philadelphia 76ers’ president of basketball operations and general manager, might have used anonymous Twitter accounts to take shots at his players while patting himself on the back. The entire episode sent NBA Twitter into overdrive, underscoring how vital social media has become in the league.
Since its earliest days, NBA fans planted a stake and claimed Twitter as their preferred meeting spot.
A community grew that included players, fans, journalists and users such as Perez, whose platforms turned them into pseudo-journalists and NBA Twitter stars.
They watch games together and comment on news, highlights and roster moves. They’ll dissect pre-game wardrobes and postgame news conferences. They traffic in humour and highlights, trading snarky analysis about things on and off the court. There’s no membership card. NBA Twitter simply requires fans to follow the game’s players and personalities and jump in a conversation that moves quickly and has no boundaries.
“It’s so hard to explain NBA Twitter to people who aren’t on Twitter,” said Alexis Morgan, whose fandom and Twitter presence helped her land a digital reporting job with the Memphis Grizzlies.
“I was trying to explain this to my mom, and she just didn’t get it. You have to be inside of it to totally understand it.”
NBA TWITTER UNPRECEDENTED
It’s no accident that the NBA has cultivated a devoted online following. The league has leveraged social media to stay relevant, to keep its fans — especially those who skew younger and more techsavvy — engaged year-round.
“If I knew what the secret sauce was, I’d bottle up it, spread it around to every single league property that I work with,” said T.J. Adeshola, Twitter’s head of sports league partnerships.
“NBA Twitter just has this really special connectivity to it that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
“It’s really reflective of the league’s approach in the broader marketplace to be innovative, to give their players this level of authenticity and connectivity. It’s relatively unprecedented in the sports space, which lends itself to a perfect, perfect marriage with a Twitter platform. The league has been the one to lift up the hood and give folks a unique view.”
A Gallup poll released earlier this year found that 37 per cent of Americans said football was their favourite sport, down from 43 per cent in 2006.
Basketball, meanwhile, stood second at 11 per cent, having surpassed baseball (nine per cent).
But the popularity online and race to attract younger fans is no contest, as social media has helped the NBA build a sizable advantage over other leagues.
According to data from Sports Business Journal and Magna Global, the average age of baseball viewers in 2016 was 57. For the NFL, it was 50, and 42 for the NBA.
Data from Nielsen has suggested that 45 per cent of NBA viewers are under 35.
While there was no formal launch of NBA Twitter, the league played a vital role in its inception.
As the internet grew and new platforms emerged, sports leagues had to wrestle with how they wanted to protect their content, particularly the highlights and video that networks paid millions of dollars to broadcast exclusively.
Melissa Brenner, the NBA’s ex- ecutive vice president of digital media, recalls sitting in a meeting room in 2005 with a handful of league lawyers and future NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who was an influential league executive at the time, debating YouTube.
“There were sports properties that didn’t appreciate the opportunity that YouTube afforded fans and looked solely at issues such as piracy and copyright, which are important issues to address,” Brenner said.
“Adam quickly identified the opportunity, which was: How do you infuse our content and communities where people are gathering? How do we make sure we’re a part of the conversation?”
While leagues such as the NFL and Major League Baseball went after sites and social media users who posted video without permission, the NBA took the opposite approach. Silver considers online videos to be a form of marketing.
He likens them to “snacks” that might whet fans’ appetites for something bigger.
“If we provide those snacks to our fans on a free basis, they’re still going to want to eat meals — which are our games. There is no substitute for the live game experience,” Silver recently told strategy+business magazine. “We believe that greater fan engagement through social media helps drive television ratings.”
SENSE OF COMMUNITY BETWEEN FANS, PLAYERS
The ability to share videos via Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat changed the nature of discourse during the season.
Fans could comment on highlights almost in real-time, swap funny captions on bloopers or make observations of things they noticed in the huddles or stands or far away from the action.
“A lot of people think Twitter is a secondary screen when you’re watching the NBA,” the Grizzlies’ Morgan said.
“I kind of think of it as the first screen because that’s the first thing I look at when something crazy happens. A lot of times, I’m watching my timeline more than I’m actually watching the game.”
Soon, everyone was tuned into the same games — or at least the same discussions — and the conversation extended well beyond the season.
Perez said he believes NBA Twitter coalesced as a community during James’ free agency in 2010.
James had injected maximum suspense, and fans gathered on sites such as Twitter and Reddit to discuss his pending decision ad nauseam, reading the Internet’s tea leaves for clues.
“All we did was chase private planes and swap this information,” Perez said. “‘Oh, there was a flight that took off from Akron to Miami. What does that mean?’ To me, that was the moment.”
What’s followed has been an endless stream of moments, mostly inconsequential events that never would have been noticed pre-social media.
Of the four major North American sports, Reddit’s NBA message board is now the only one with more than one million subscribers.
With this rabid community dissecting things big and small, everything is subject to analysis, even if it’s only tangentially related to basketball.
There’s JaVale McGee bloopers, Russell Westbrook outfits, Twitter beefs and Nick Young being Nick Young. Chris Paul and superstar friends were on a banana boat, DeAndre Jordan was jokingly kidnapped by the Clippers (which spawned a series of emoji from NBA players and revealed Paul Pierce’s technological illiteracy), and the Rockets tried to use a secret tunnel to find the Clippers’ locker-room for a post-game scrap, ors owe thought at the time.
“It’s all these things that maybe you and your buddies would be talking about,” Perez said.
“What Twitter did was put it all front and centre. This is how I’ve always watched the game. You care about the score, but I was always looking for things like crossovers, poster dunks, pettiness, unnecessary drama. Things like Malice at the Palace or John Starks fighting. I lived for that.”
He just had no idea his interest on the sideline could someday pay dividends. Nobody did.
SHAQ TRAILBLAZER ON TWITTER
Shaquille O’Neal was one of the first athletes to embrace Twitter, effectively kicking open a doorway back in 2008 for nearly every player since. More so than many athletes from other sports, NBA stars can be more willing to share parts of their personal lives, fostering a deeper connection with fans, Twitter’s Adeshola said.
“The focus on the lifestyle, the focus on this relatability that Twitter allows to connect directly one-toone with these folks has really come to life on the platform,” he said. “If it was about the box score, the conversation would be relegated to just the regular season. But you see that it’s a yearlong dialogue.”
Some of the biggest tweets take place out of season and have little to do with the sport.
There were nearly 76 million NBA-related tweets from the end of the NBA Finals last year to the season opener four months later, a testament to the league’s desire to be a year-round topic of conversation. Players often craft storylines that fans flesh out with their commentary and chatter.
Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade, who has eight million followers, tweeted about the victims of Florida’s Parkland School shooting in February, a post that received 538,000 likes and 155,000 retweets. Blake Griffin posted a comical GIF from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in January after he was traded that got 260,000 likes and 105,000 retweets.
The biggest athlete tweet ever came, not surprisingly, from James, who has nearly 42 million followers on the platform.
He directed a tweet last September at President Donald Trump, whom he called “U bum,” adding, “Going to White House was a great honour until you showed up!” It received nearly 1.5 million likes and 645,000 retweets.
“Can you imagine if the NBA ever allowed players to go to their phones during games?” Perez said, referring to a rule the league introduced after a player tweeted midgame in 2009.
“Oh my God, can you just imagine what J.R. Smith would tweet at halftime after going 0 for 9 or 12 for 12 or getting a flagrant from pushing Al Horford? Holy (cow), that would be amazing!”