The year is 2015; it’s July, the NBA off-season and the boiling point for media and fan speculation about potential trades. The exact verbiage of Fox sports analyst Chris Broussard’s tweet about then-Dallas Mavericks center Deandre Jordan is seared—perhaps forever—into the brains of unsaid numbers of terminally online NBA fans: “Sources: [Mavericks owner Mark Cuban] is beside himself. Driving around downtown Dallas begging (thru texts) Jordan’s family for address to Deandre’s home.”
The varying Twitter-based NBA group chats I’m in continue to quote the tweet about Jordan’s impending trade to the Clippers—absurd to the point of poetry—verbatim, some eight years later.
My experience of NBA fandom on Twitter—known colloquially as “NBA Twitter”—is colored by a range of similarly absurd, similarly poetic memories. For example: a viral Twitter thread (I refuse to call it an “X” thread, sorry Elon!) that pledged to keep shrinking 6’1” Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young for every 25 likes, in the iconic photo of Young defending 6’10” Ben Simmons during their jaw-dropping match-up in the 2021 Eastern Conference semi-final.
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