Thursday night, the Bulls drafted Bobby Portis. That’s awkward, because when Portis was 16, he tweeted this!
NBA Draft picks once tweeted stupid things because they were idiot teenagers
The idiocy of teenagers on social media is an unstoppable force. Even NBA players were once victims.
Well this is awkward... pic.twitter.com/913rcQ6IgD
— SportsNation (@SportsNation) June 26, 2015 Thursday night, the Lakers drafted Larry Nance. That's awkward, because when he was 19, he tweeted this!
Seems the Lakers' new draft pick just deleted this old tweet from 2012. Probably a good idea. pic.twitter.com/kC33QuIvPL
— Baxter Holmes (@BaxterHolmes) June 26, 2015 This is a new post-NBA Draft genre of journalism. Every new draftee came of age in the era when it was normal for high schoolers to have Twitter accounts, so most new draftees have Twitter accounts, and therefore it's possible to scan their thousands upon thousands of tweets to see if they ever had anything bad to say about their new team or teammates.
I was once an teen, as were you. I can confirm that I was an idiot at the time.
Olds have speculated that teens are dumb for thousands of years. They’ve been searching for evidence, information to compile to present to some sort of high court that could potentially banish all teenagers to an island until they’re 19. But it’s been hard to find: they forgot to put the camera on when this teen tried microwaving a lamp; nobody else was around when this teen tried drinking for the first time and had three Long Island Iced Teas instead of like a beer; there was no tape recorder handy when this teen said all these horrible things about his classmate. But millenia of failure have reached an end: teens now voluntarily take all the horrible things they say and do and put them online for eternity.
Every single teen has eventually metamorphosed out of their idiot cocoons. “Wait,” they say, flapping their new, slightly less dumb, 20-something wings. “Why did I do all that stuff? Why did I think all that stuff? And jeez, why did I say all that stuff?” But for the first few thousand generations of human life, there was little in the way of documentation of all those dumb things. Now, there is SO MUCH. If a teenager thought a thing was bad for eight seconds five years ago, that moment is crystallized online, for future reference if and when it should become ironic that they once thought that thing was bad. In this case, these guys once thought mean things about sports teams/athletes. BOOM. It’s there forever.
Playing GOTCHA with NBA players who acted like teens before they were NBA players is funny, because dumb people doing dumb things is funny.
Playing GOTCHA with NBA players who acted like teens before they were NBA players, however, is not actually news.
When these players go into their new workplaces and interact with the people they once dissed, the main topic of conversation will not be YO WHY’D YOU TWEET THAT IN 2011? Kobe will be a jerk to Larry Nance, because Larry Nance is a rookie and Kobe is a jerk to rookies. Derrick Rose probably won’t say anything to Bobby Portis, because Derrick Rose has never said anybody to anything.
(We could maybe talk to Larry Nance about how making jokes about rape trivializes rape even if you’re trying to say that rape is bad.)
Idiot teens will keep thinking idiot things, and their hamster wheel of a filter will continue to fail to prevent them from idiotically sharing their idiocy with the world. The world will keep turning, and so will the hamster wheel.
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SB Nation video archives: Athletes being dumb with smartphones (2013)
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