NBA players addicted to their phones
Good luck getting them to unplug coaches say, despite league and team rules
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 pregame 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 explains.
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 X’s and O’s on the whiteboard — has the locker-room veteran breaking the rules. “I mean, it’s addictive,” Terry admits. 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.
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 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 2 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.”
Some NBA coaches say there is no cure for the “social media disease.”
“You’re banging your head against the wall if you’re going to try to get them to put their phones down,” the Detroit Pistons’ Stan Van Gundy says. “They’re not on their phones when we’re in a pregame meeting, they’re not on their phones when we’re in meetings, they’re not on their phones when they’re out there playing. But every other time, as soon as I walk out of the postgame meeting ...”
Coach Luke Walton has not banned phones from the Los Angeles Lakers’ breakfast meetings or film-room sessions, but if a player’s device rings, he can expect to pay a small fine.
When 76ers coach Brett Brown scrolls through Embiid’s social media feeds and notices something controversial — such as Embiid and Miami Heat centre Hassan Whiteside engaging in Twitter trash talk after a pre-season game — he will use it as a teachable moment.
“If you can find a way to not dismiss it and educate them on the pitfalls of social media, of which there are many, then, you know, you’re just not living with your head in the sand,” Brown says. “It’s the world we live in.”
Triano says it’s much like the way he texts his kids to get through to them.
“I know they’re going to get that before they hear me verbally,” he says. “It’s the way things are, and I think we as coaches need to adapt and know that it’s going to take different ways to reach these young kids now.”
Back inside the Bucks’ space, Terry looks around and sees teammates watching the pregame scouting video. Occasionally, one looks down at his phone and thumbs up, though it’s only to find the next song.
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.