Colangelo in Twitter kerfuffle

Report links Sixers executive to five burner accounts focused on Philly, Raps

After Bryan Colangelo left the Toronto Raptors five years ago, he vanished. Not from life — he still lived in Yorkville, still watched his son play high school basketball, was occasionally glimpsed having a drink with someone from the basketball world. But in terms of public events, in places NBA people were seen, he wasn’t there. When he appeared at an MLSE party at all-star weekend in 2016, his reappearance was noted. He had, after all, experienced a near-death career exile. He looked good.

People were looking at Colangelo differently Wednesday, after a story by Ben Detrick on the website The Ringer that, if you are one of the lucky folks who do not live online, requires some explanation. Essentially, five anonymous, so-called burner accounts on Twitter seem linked to Colangelo, the Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations. Burner accounts are just ways to lurk, to listen in or shout, or to sway a Presidential election to destroy the global order if everything goes well.

These burner accounts appear to fit a pattern. Obsessed with the Sixers, and to a lesser extent, the Raptors. They follow people connected to Colangelo’s life. They criticized Raptors president Masai Ujiri, and Colangelo’s 76ers predecessor, Sam Hinkie. They slammed Sixers players, from superstar Joel Embiid to No. 1 pick Markelle Fultz. And they disclosed potentially sensitive medical information about then-Sixers like Jahlil Okafor. They defended Colangelo. They knew something. A lot, even.

Colangelo admitted to operating only the most anodyne of the five accounts; he has denied knowledge of the rest. Some of it is hard to explain away. When The Ringer asked the 76ers about two of the five accounts, and only two, the other three went private on the same day. Colangelo was also said to be obsessed with Ujiri, whom he hired as an assistant GM before Ujiri displaced him in 2013.

So Embiid, the first truly online sports superstar, spent Tuesday night roasting his boss on Twitter. The team has announced an internal investigation. As Embiid told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, “I talked to him and he said that he didn’t say that.

“He called me just to deny the story. Gotta believe him until proven otherwise. If true though, that would be really bad.”

Friends and colleagues of Colangelo expressed disbelief that it could be him. He would not take risks like that; he would not call Ujiri, whom he hired to work for the Raptors, a “trust fund baby” living off Colangelo’s decisions; especially not when he was the son of one of the true titan executives and owners in the NBA, Jerry Colangelo. Defending his own famously high collars? Occasionally mangled English? As one source who knows Colangelo well said, “It’s close to what he says, but he wouldn’t say some of that stuff.”

Even in off-the-record, latenight conversations with friends during his exile, Colangelo never slammed Ujiri.

The counterpoint was that in Toronto and Phoenix, Colangelo was both someone who evinced outward confidence and who held a deep insecurity. At summer league in Las Vegas, a media member once pointed out to Colangelo that he had a spot of mustard on a golf shirt; Colangelo would half-jokingly bring it up for months. Some staffers said he had a Google alert set for his own name, so anything written would pop up in his inbox. They said Bryan didn’t just read the coverage: he obsessed over the comments, too.

The No. 1 rule of the internet, of course, is Don’t Read The Comments.

But Colangelo’s security, according to people who know him well, stems back to his father. Jerry is said to have been unfailingly supportive and proud, but Bryan has tried to escape that shadow anyway. As a friend said, it’s Bryan “feeling like he’s chasing a ghost he will never catch.”

So if Colangelo was going to do it, that was why. Because Toronto took off after he left, and the cult of Sam Hinkie still lingers in Philadelphia, and because the anonymity of Twitter would have given him the first chance in his life to talk back at critics, to let it all out. Executives in every sport privately trash players and coaches and rivals. Just not in public.

Wednesday night, several Sixers fan accounts sleuthed something: the phone number associated with three of the accounts ended in 91, and while that wasn’t Colangelo’s number, it appeared to match the phone number of his wife, Barbara Bottini, as evidenced from a memo from the time she was the head of the Parents’ Organization at Upper Canada College. One league source close to the situation had said they were 99.9 per cent sure it wasn’t him. Well. She has always been a big part of his career, and she would have been there when he was sidelined, cast into limbo, afraid his career — his reason for being, in a lot of ways — was over. She would have known how much he needed to succeed, and needed to be seen to succeed. Roger Goodell’s wife secretly defended him on Twitter. Colangelo’s wife appears to have done the same. The fact that the accounts went dark — well, it seems like he must have known.

So in a league where an MVP, Kevin Durant, used a burner account to defend himself, it’s a most NBA scandal, a most 2018 scandal, in a world where the Internet breaks more and more brains.

It’s the strangest, funniest, craziest sports league in the world, where a scandal can be otherworldly, and so strangely, sadly human.