Kevin Love, Twitter Martyr

From Jerry Zgoda of the Minnesota Star-Tribune comes the story of Kevin Love, who was once one of the more prominent NBA twitter users, but has been silent for the past few months after a few tweets landed him in hot water with T’Wolves management. From Zgoda:

Love, a child of the computer age, embraced the Twitter social-network phenomenon as enthusiastically as any pro athlete, so much so he unintentionally broke the worldwide news that Kevin McHale wasn’t coming back as Timberwolves coach and honestly offered up his comments on the team’s confounding draft night.
“I got shut down a little while from the Boss Man,” Love said. “But be on the lookout: I’ll be back. I just got tired of (Jim) Stack or (Fred) Hoiberg calling me and telling me not to tweet about this, not to tweet about that. I just said, ‘What happened to the First Amendment law?’ ”
David Kahn, the Wolves president of basketball operations, said he wants Love to feel free to tweet and will encourage him to do so.And Love’s situation is indicative of what’s going to be much harder for the NBA to regulate, at least on an institutional level. How do you tell someone what they can and can’t tweet? You can place restrictions on when and where players use social media, but what about “how” they use it?
Kevin Love made waves not because he was talking to fans at halftime, but because he was talking to fans honestly. Like when he responded on draft night to the Wolves taking three points guards:

Or when he broke the news of Minnesota firing head coach Kevin McHale, and expressed his disappointment about it. At some point, NBA players run the risk of sharing too much. And while Love’s revelations were relatively tame, players like Ron Artest regularly talk to fans about their personal life, or offer commentary on current events. How does a league, or a team, police that type of behavior? Or is it necessarily a bad thing?

These are questions that went unanswered yesterday, when the NBA released a perfectly fair and reasonable policy--just don’t tweet from the games, and we’ll leave it up to the individual franchises to decide what’s okay from there. For now, the league’s stopped short of regulating what players say. But with modern-day athletes more outspoken than ever, and Twitter emerging as a seemingly innocuous medium through which they can express themselves, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.

Kevin Love got tired of hearing from his bosses about what can and can’t be tweeted, and shut his account down, himself. In the future, the resolutions might not be so tidy, and the league may face a serious dilemma: how much influence does the NBA or an individual franchise have over the statements of individual players? An interesting question, and one that sooner or later, “this new Twitter stuff” is going to force the league to answer.