More NBA players follow Wale on Twitter than Kendrick Lamar or Migos

Basketball and hip-hop are intrinsically linked together, and there’s even a famous Rick Ross line that goes, “Rappers wanna be ballers, ballers wanna be rappers.” The stars for both industries interact, and occasionally, crossover between the two sides.

Given that, an r/NBA post from grizz101012 from Tuesday is extremely interesting. It’s an unscientific look at the most famous rappers among actual NBA players, based on how many NBA players as of Tuesday (including players with two-way contracts) follow those rappers. It’s possible Instagram would be a better measuring stick, since that platform leans more towards artists, but we’ll take what we can get here.

I’ll post the top 15, but the list goes on for 100 names, if you want to see the full thing.

Some worthwhile qualifiers: players following rappers on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean they listen to them more than someone they don’t follow, and vice versa. Kanye West, perhaps the most influential rap artist in the past decade, deleted his Twitter a while back, so he is unable to show up on this list. Similarly, only the official Migos account is listed for this, and some players may only follow the trio individually instead.

And because Lil B ranks 13th on this list, yeah, you can bet that this list is definitely influenced by how these rappers use Twitter. Lil B follows everyone, tweets constantly, and talks about the NBA all the time, so it’s no surprise he has earned more follow backs than an objectively better artist like 2 Chainz.

Look, this is the best thing about the whole list. Wale keeps releasing music and he had a few pop smashes on his last album, but his hip-hop peak was from 2008 to 2011. Nobody’s talking about him like they talk about Drake or J. Cole, the only two rappers above him on this list. Still, there are some explanations:

So for those reasons above, Wale is more popular on Twitter than Kendrick Lamar, even though I bet most players would say they listen to and enjoy Kendrick more.

Also, please watch this wonderful video of Wale getting mad at the Toronto Raptors announcing crew.

Say what you want about artists like Lil Uzi Vert (19 NBA player followers) and Playboi Carti (not even on the list), but the teens are all bumping these dudes. Still, the average age of an NBA player this season is 26.6 years old. With each incoming draft class, I’d imagine lists like these will trend younger, but baby-faced teams like the Lakers aren’t the best representation of the league.

Plus, the teens don’t care about Twitter. If the young Lakers core have taught us anything, it’s that Instagram is king now.

He was ranked 40th with 34 NBA players following him, despite being closely connected to an NBA team (the Houston Rockets) and good friends with a league superstar (James Harden). Scott even has a baby with Kylie Jenner, but that still doesn’t make him famous enough to get a follow from, say, Jonas Jerebko.

Vince Staples is another guy I thought would be followed by more, but he has just nine. He tweets a lot, even though he’s constantly deleting old tweets, too. And he’s funny as hell talking about the NBA.

Lillard dropped what was actually a really solid album earlier this season. He’s by far the best athlete-turned-rapper out there, to be sure, even if I’m not exactly going back all the time to Lillard’s work. If you considered him a rapper, he is followed by 160 NBA players ... which would still leave him one short of Drake.

That just says something about Drake, though, really. Dude’s an icon, like it or not.

Head over here for the full r/NBA post, and a full list of the top 100 rappers followed.